MobyDick

byHermanMelvi
lle
The Project Gutenberg EBook of Moby Dick; or The Whale, by Herman Melville

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Title: Moby Dick; or The Whale

Author: Herman Melville

Last Updated: January 3, 2009

Release Date: December 25, 2008 [EBook #2701]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE ***

Produced by Daniel Lazarus, Jonesey, and David Widger

MOBY DICK;

or, THE WHALE

By Herman Melville
 Contents

ETYMOLOGY.
EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).

CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.
CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.
CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.
CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.
CHAPTER 6. The Street.
CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.
CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.
CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.
CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.
CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.
CHAPTER 12. Biographical.
CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.
CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
CHAPTER 15. Chowder.
CHAPTER 16. The Ship.
CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.
CHAPTER 18. His Mark.
CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.
CHAPTER 20. All Astir.
CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.
CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.
CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.
CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.
CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.
CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.
CHAPTER 32. Cetology.
CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.
CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.
CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
 CHAPTER 37. Sunset.
CHAPTER 38. Dusk.
CHAPTER 39. First Night Watch.
CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.
CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.
CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale.
CHAPTER 43. Hark!
CHAPTER 44. The Chart.
CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.
CHAPTER 46. Surmises.
CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.
CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.
CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.
CHAPTER 50. Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.
CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.
CHAPTER 53. The Gam.
CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho's Story.
CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the
True
CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron;
in
CHAPTER 58. Brit.
CHAPTER 59. Squid.
CHAPTER 60. The Line.
CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.
CHAPTER 62. The Dart.
CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.
CHAPTER 64. Stubb's Supper.
CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.
CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.
CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.
CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.
CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam's Story.
CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.
CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a
Talk
CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale's Head—Contrasted View.
CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale's Head—Contrasted View.
CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.
CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
 CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.
CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.
CHAPTER 80. The Nut.
CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
CHAPTER 82. The Honour and Glory of Whaling.
CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.
CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.
CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.
CHAPTER 86. The Tail.
CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.
CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.
CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.
CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.
CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.
CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.
CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.
CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.
CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.
CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.
CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.
CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.
CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton.
CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.
CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish?—Will He
Perish?
CHAPTER 106. Ahab's Leg.
CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.
CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.
CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.
CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.
CHAPTER 113. The Forge.
CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.
CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.
CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.
CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.
CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.
CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle Bulwarks.
CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning.
CHAPTER 123. The Musket.
CHAPTER 124. The Needle.
CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.
CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.
CHAPTER 127. The Deck.
CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.
CHAPTER 130. The Hat.
CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day.
CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day.
CHAPTER 135. The Chase.—Third Day.
Epilogue

Original Transcriber's Notes:

This text is a combination of etexts, one from the now-defunct ERIS

project at Virginia Tech and one from Project Gutenberg's archives.
The proofreaders of this version are indebted to The University of
Adelaide Library for preserving the Virginia Tech version. The resulting
etext was compared with a public domain hard copy version of the text.
In chapters 24, 89, and 90, we substituted a capital L for the symbol
for the British pound, a unit of currency.
 ETYMOLOGY.
(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a
Grammar School)
The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see
him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a
queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of
all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars;
it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
"While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by
what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out,
through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the
signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true."
—HACKLUYT
"WHALE.... Sw. and Dan. HVAL. This animal is named from
roundness or rolling; for in Dan. HVALT is arched or vaulted."
—WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY
"WHALE.... It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger.
WALLEN; A.S. WALW-IAN, to roll, to wallow." —RICHARDSON'S
DICTIONARY

KETOS, GREEK.
CETUS, LATIN.
WHOEL, ANGLO-SAXON.
HVALT, DANISH.
WAL, DUTCH.
HWAL, SWEDISH.
WHALE, ICELANDIC.
WHALE, ENGLISH.
BALEINE, FRENCH.
BALLENA, SPANISH.
PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, FEGEE.
PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, ERROMANGOAN.
 EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-
Librarian).
It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm
of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long
Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random
allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever,
sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least,
take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in
these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching
the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing,
these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a
glancing bird's eye view of what has been promiscuously said,
thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and
generations, including our own.
So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I
am. Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of
this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be
too rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel
poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them
bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether
unpleasant sadness—Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the
more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye
for ever go thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court
and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the
royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before
are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of
long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming.
Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike
unsplinterable glasses!
EXTRACTS.
"And God created great whales." —GENESIS.
"Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the
deep to be hoary." —JOB.
"Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah."
—JONAH.
"There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made
to play therein." —PSALMS.
"In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword,
shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that
crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea."
—ISAIAH
"And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this
monster's mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all
incontinently that foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the
bottomless gulf of his paunch." —HOLLAND'S PLUTARCH'S
MORALS.
"The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are:
among which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up
as much in length as four acres or arpens of land." —HOLLAND'S
PLINY.
"Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about
sunrise a great many Whales and other monsters of the sea,
appeared. Among the former, one was of a most monstrous size....
This came towards us, open-mouthed, raising the waves on all sides,
and beating the sea before him into a foam." —TOOKE'S LUCIAN.
"THE TRUE HISTORY."
"He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales,
which had bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he
brought some to the king.... The best whales were catched in his own
country, of which some were forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He
said that he was one of six who had killed sixty in two days."
—OTHER OR OTHER'S VERBAL NARRATIVE TAKEN DOWN
FROM HIS MOUTH BY KING ALFRED, A.D. 890.
"And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that
enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster's (whale's) mouth, are
immediately lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in
great security, and there sleeps." —MONTAIGNE. —APOLOGY FOR
RAIMOND SEBOND.
"Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if is not Leviathan described
by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job." —RABELAIS.
"This whale's liver was two cartloads." —STOWE'S ANNALS.
"The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling
pan." —LORD BACON'S VERSION OF THE PSALMS.
"Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have
received nothing certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an
incredible quantity of oil will be extracted out of one whale." —IBID.
"HISTORY OF LIFE AND DEATH."
"The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward
bruise." —KING HENRY.
"Very like a whale." —HAMLET.

"Which to secure, no skill of leach's art

Mote him availle, but to returne againe
To his wound's worker, that with lowly dart,
Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine,
Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro' the maine."
—THE FAERIE QUEEN.

"Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a

peaceful calm trouble the ocean til it boil." —SIR WILLIAM
DAVENANT. PREFACE TO GONDIBERT.
"What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned
Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit."
—SIR T. BROWNE. OF SPERMA CETI AND THE SPERMA CETI
WHALE. VIDE HIS V. E.

"Like Spencer's Talus with his modern flail

He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.
...
Their fixed jav'lins in his side he wears,
And on his back a grove of pikes appears."
—WALLER'S BATTLE OF THE SUMMER ISLANDS.

"By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or

State—(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man." —OPENING
SENTENCE OF HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN.
"Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a
sprat in the mouth of a whale." —PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.

"That sea beast

Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean stream." —PARADISE LOST.

—-"There Leviathan,
Hugest of living creatures, in the deep
Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,
And seems a moving land; and at his gills
Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea." —IBID.

"The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea
of oil swimming in them." —FULLLER'S PROFANE AND HOLY
STATE.

"So close behind some promontory lie

The huge Leviathan to attend their prey,
And give no chance, but swallow in the fry,
Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way."
—DRYDEN'S ANNUS MIRABILIS.

"While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off his
head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it
will be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water." —THOMAS EDGE'S
TEN VOYAGES TO SPITZBERGEN, IN PURCHAS.
"In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in
wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which
nature has placed on their shoulders." —SIR T. HERBERT'S
VOYAGES INTO ASIA AND AFRICA. HARRIS COLL.
"Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced
to proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their
ship upon them." —SCHOUTEN'S SIXTH CIRCUMNAVIGATION.
"We set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The Jonas-
in-the-Whale.... Some say the whale can't open his mouth, but that is
a fable.... They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they can
see a whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains.... I was
told of a whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel of
herrings in his belly.... One of our harpooneers told me that he caught
once a whale in Spitzbergen that was white all over." —A VOYAGE
TO GREENLAND, A.D. 1671 HARRIS COLL.
"Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652,
one eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I
was informed), besides a vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of
baleen. The jaws of it stand for a gate in the garden of Pitferren."
—SIBBALD'S FIFE AND KINROSS.
"Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this
Sperma-ceti whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that was
killed by any man, such is his fierceness and swiftness." —RICHARD
STRAFFORD'S LETTER FROM THE BERMUDAS. PHIL. TRANS.
A.D. 1668.
"Whales in the sea God's voice obey." —N. E. PRIMER.
"We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in
those southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have
to the northward of us." —CAPTAIN COWLEY'S VOYAGE ROUND
THE GLOBE, A.D. 1729.
"... and the breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an
insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain."
—ULLOA'S SOUTH AMERICA.

"To fifty chosen sylphs of special note,

We trust the important charge, the petticoat.
Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail,
Tho' stuffed with hoops and armed with ribs of whale."
—RAPE OF THE LOCK.

"If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those

that take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear
contemptible in the comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest
animal in creation." —GOLDSMITH, NAT. HIST.
"If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them
speak like great wales." —GOLDSMITH TO JOHNSON.
"In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it
was found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and
were then towing ashore. They seemed to endeavor to conceal
themselves behind the whale, in order to avoid being seen by us."
—COOK'S VOYAGES.
"The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so
great dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to
mention even their names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood,
and some other articles of the same nature in their boats, in order to
terrify and prevent their too near approach." —UNO VON TROIL'S
LETTERS ON BANKS'S AND SOLANDER'S VOYAGE TO
ICELAND IN 1772.
"The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active,
fierce animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the
fishermen." —THOMAS JEFFERSON'S WHALE MEMORIAL TO
THE FRENCH MINISTER IN 1778.
"And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?" —EDMUND
BURKE'S REFERENCE IN PARLIAMENT TO THE NANTUCKET
WHALE-FISHERY.
"Spain—a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe."
—EDMUND BURKE. (SOMEWHERE.)
"A tenth branch of the king's ordinary revenue, said to be grounded
on the consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from
pirates and robbers, is the right to royal fish, which are whale and
sturgeon. And these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the
coast, are the property of the king." —BLACKSTONE.
"Soon to the sport of death the crews repair:
Rodmond unerring o'er his head suspends
The barbed steel, and every turn attends."
—FALCONER'S SHIPWRECK.

"Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires,

And rockets blew self driven,
To hang their momentary fire
Around the vault of heaven.

"So fire with water to compare,

The ocean serves on high,
Up-spouted by a whale in air,
To express unwieldy joy." —COWPER, ON THE QUEEN'S
VISIT TO LONDON.

"Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a

stroke, with immense velocity." —JOHN HUNTER'S ACCOUNT OF
THE DISSECTION OF A WHALE. (A SMALL SIZED ONE.)
"The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the
water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage
through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood
gushing from the whale's heart." —PALEY'S THEOLOGY.
"The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet." —BARON
CUVIER.
"In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not
take any till the first of May, the sea being then covered with them."
—COLNETT'S VOYAGE FOR THE PURPOSE OF EXTENDING
THE SPERMACETI WHALE FISHERY.

"In the free element beneath me swam,

Floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle,
Fishes of every colour, form, and kind;
Which language cannot paint, and mariner
Had never seen; from dread Leviathan
To insect millions peopling every wave:
Gather'd in shoals immense, like floating islands,
Led by mysterious instincts through that waste
And trackless region, though on every side
Assaulted by voracious enemies,
Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm'd in front or jaw,
With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs."
—MONTGOMERY'S WORLD BEFORE THE FLOOD.

"Io! Paean! Io! sing.

To the finny people's king.
Not a mightier whale than this
In the vast Atlantic is;
Not a fatter fish than he,
Flounders round the Polar Sea."
—CHARLES LAMB'S TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE.

"In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the
whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed:
there—pointing to the sea—is a green pasture where our children's
grand-children will go for bread." —OBED MACY'S HISTORY OF
NANTUCKET.
"I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the
form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale's jaw bones."
—HAWTHORNE'S TWICE TOLD TALES.
 "She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had
been killed by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years
ago." —IBID.
"No, Sir, 'tis a Right Whale," answered Tom; "I saw his sprout; he
threw up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to
look at. He's a raal oil-butt, that fellow!" —COOPER'S PILOT.
"The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that
whales had been introduced on the stage there." —ECKERMANN'S
CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE.
"My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?" I answered, "we have
been stove by a whale." —"NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF
THE WHALE SHIP ESSEX OF NANTUCKET, WHICH WAS
ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY A LARGE SPERM
WHALE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN." BY OWEN CHACE OF
NANTUCKET, FIRST MATE OF SAID VESSEL. NEW YORK, 1821.

"A mariner sat in the shrouds one night,

The wind was piping free;
Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale,
And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale,
As it floundered in the sea."
—ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH.

"The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the

capture of this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or
nearly six English miles....
"Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which,
cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four miles."
—SCORESBY.
"Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the
infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous
head, and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him;
he rushes at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him
with vast swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed.... It is a matter
of great astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so
interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, so important an
animal (as the Sperm Whale) should have been so entirely
neglected, or should have excited so little curiosity among the
numerous, and many of them competent observers, that of late
years, must have possessed the most abundant and the most
convenient opportunities of witnessing their habitudes." —THOMAS
BEALE'S HISTORY OF THE SPERM WHALE, 1839.
"The Cachalot" (Sperm Whale) "is not only better armed than the
True Whale" (Greenland or Right Whale) "in possessing a formidable
weapon at either extremity of its body, but also more frequently
displays a disposition to employ these weapons offensively and in
manner at once so artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its
being regarded as the most dangerous to attack of all the known
species of the whale tribe." —FREDERICK DEBELL BENNETT'S
WHALING VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, 1840.

October 13. "There she blows," was sung out from the mast-head.
"Where away?" demanded the captain.
"Three points off the lee bow, sir."
"Raise up your wheel. Steady!" "Steady, sir."
"Mast-head ahoy! Do you see that whale now?"
"Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows! There she
breaches!"
"Sing out! sing out every time!"
"Ay Ay, sir! There she blows! there—there—THAR she
blows—bowes—bo-o-os!"
"How far off?"
"Two miles and a half."
"Thunder and lightning! so near! Call all hands."
—J. ROSS BROWNE'S ETCHINGS OF A WHALING CRUIZE. 1846.

"The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the

horrid transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island of
Nantucket." —"NARRATIVE OF THE GLOBE," BY LAY AND
HUSSEY SURVIVORS. A.D. 1828.
Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried
the assault for some time with a lance; but the furious monster at
length rushed on the boat; himself and comrades only being
preserved by leaping into the water when they saw the onset was
inevitable." —MISSIONARY JOURNAL OF TYERMAN AND
BENNETT.
"Nantucket itself," said Mr. Webster, "is a very striking and peculiar
portion of the National interest. There is a population of eight or nine
thousand persons living here in the sea, adding largely every year to
the National wealth by the boldest and most persevering industry."
—REPORT OF DANIEL WEBSTER'S SPEECH IN THE U. S.
SENATE, ON THE APPLICATION FOR THE ERECTION OF A
BREAKWATER AT NANTUCKET. 1828.
"The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a
moment." —"THE WHALE AND HIS CAPTORS, OR THE
WHALEMAN'S ADVENTURES AND THE WHALE'S BIOGRAPHY,
GATHERED ON THE HOMEWARD CRUISE OF THE
COMMODORE PREBLE." BY REV. HENRY T. CHEEVER.
"If you make the least damn bit of noise," replied Samuel, "I will
send you to hell." —LIFE OF SAMUEL COMSTOCK (THE
MUTINEER), BY HIS BROTHER, WILLIAM COMSTOCK. ANOTHER
VERSION OF THE WHALE-SHIP GLOBE NARRATIVE.
"The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in
order, if possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though
they failed of their main object, laid-open the haunts of the whale."
—MCCULLOCH'S COMMERCIAL DICTIONARY.
"These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound
forward again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the
whalemen seem to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same
mystic North-West Passage." —FROM "SOMETHING"
UNPUBLISHED.
"It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being
struck by her near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with
look-outs at the mast-heads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse
around them, has a totally different air from those engaged in regular
voyage." —CURRENTS AND WHALING. U.S. EX. EX.
"Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect
having seen large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to form
arches over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may
perhaps have been told that these were the ribs of whales."
—TALES OF A WHALE VOYAGER TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN.
"It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales,
that the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages
enrolled among the crew." —NEWSPAPER ACCOUNT OF THE
TAKING AND RETAKING OF THE WHALE-SHIP HOBOMACK.
"It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels
(American) few ever return in the ships on board of which they
departed." —CRUISE IN A WHALE BOAT.
"Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up
perpendicularly into the air. It was the while." —MIRIAM COFFIN OR
THE WHALE FISHERMAN.
"The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you
would manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of
a rope tied to the root of his tail." —A CHAPTER ON WHALING IN
RIBS AND TRUCKS.
"On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably
male and female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less
than a stone's throw of the shore" (Terra Del Fuego), "over which the
beech tree extended its branches." —DARWIN'S VOYAGE OF A
NATURALIST.
"'Stern all!' exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw
the distended jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the
boat, threatening it with instant destruction;—'Stern all, for your
lives!'" —WHARTON THE WHALE KILLER.
"So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, While the bold
harpooneer is striking the whale!" —NANTUCKET SONG.

"Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale

In his ocean home will be
A giant in might, where might is right,
And King of the boundless sea."
—WHALE SONG.
 CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in
my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see
the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in
my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the
rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that
it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and
methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his
sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men
in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with
me.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral
reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its
extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by
breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers
there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties
Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all
around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some
leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of
ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But
these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to
benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive.
Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee
of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can
without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from
lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me,
does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you
please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream.
There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries
—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water
there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this
experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every
one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting
bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs?
There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here
sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke.
Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains
bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree
shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the
shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when
for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm
wanting?—Water—there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would
you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly
receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or
invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy
with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first
voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and
your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the
Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning.
And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the
tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same
image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of
life; and this is the key to it all.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the
eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to
sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a
rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick—grow quarrelsome—don't
sleep of nights—do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a
passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a
Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For
my part, I abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind
whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships,
barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,—though I confess there is
considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I never
fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and
peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled
fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted
river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the
forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me
jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is
unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old established
family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just
previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster,
making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a
schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you
to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the
decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament?
Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and
respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well,
then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me
about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other
served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so
the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and
be content.
Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble,
whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary,
passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and
being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard
thieves entailed upon us. But BEING PAID,—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with
which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money
to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how
cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the
fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern
(that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the
quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he
breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many
other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having
repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling
voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and
secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way—he can better answer than any
one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme
of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo
between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something
like this:
"GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES.
"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.
"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for
this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high
tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot
tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the
springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me
to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice
resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.
Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a
portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where
he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the
attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish.
With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am
tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on
barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be
social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of
the place one lodges in.
By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the
wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two
there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one
grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
 CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.
I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn
and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a
Saturday night in December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the little packet for
Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place would offer, till the following
Monday.
As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at this same New
Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be related that I, for one, had no idea of
so doing. For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was
a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, which
amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolising the
business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet
Nantucket was her great original—the Tyre of this Carthage;—the place where the first dead
American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen, the
Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket,
too, did that first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported cobblestones—so
goes the story—to throw at the whales, in order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a
harpoon from the bowsprit?
Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me in New Bedford, ere I could
embark for my destined port, it became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep
meanwhile. It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and
cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only
brought up a few pieces of silver,—So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the
middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with the
darkness towards the south—wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my
dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and don't be too particular.
With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of "The Crossed Harpoons"—but it
looked too expensive and jolly there. Further on, from the bright red windows of the "Sword-Fish
Inn," there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and ice from
before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic
pavement,—rather weary for me, when I struck my foot against the flinty projections, because from
hard, remorseless service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight. Too expensive
and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the broad glare in the street, and hear the
sounds of the tinkling glasses within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don't you hear? get away
from before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I went. I now by instinct
followed the streets that took me waterward, for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the
cheeriest inns.
Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a
candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week,
that quarter of the town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light proceeding
from a low, wide building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it
were meant for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an ash-
box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost choked me, are these ashes from
that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But "The Crossed Harpoons," and "The Sword-Fish?"—this, then
must needs be the sign of "The Trap." However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within,
pushed on and opened a second, interior door.
It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in
their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a
negro church; and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and
wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at
the sign of 'The Trap!'
Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn
creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it,
faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath—"The Spouter
Inn:—Peter Coffin."
Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I. But it is a common
name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light
looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden
house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and
as the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot
for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.
It was a queer sort of place—a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning
over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a
worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul's tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty
pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. "In judging of
that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon," says an old writer—of whose works I possess the only
copy extant—"it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window
where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where
the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier." True enough, thought I,
as this passage occurred to my mind—old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are
windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the
crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it's too late to make any improvements
now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years
ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off
his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his
mouth, and yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in
his red silken wrapper—(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty night;
how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting
conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.
But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand northern
lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him down
lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to
keep out this frost?
Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of Dives, this is
more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself,
he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a
temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.
But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to
come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this "Spouter" may
be.
 CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.
Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with
old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one
side hung a very large oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the
unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic
visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of
its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought
some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate
chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings,
and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to
the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of
something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in
a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.
Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you
to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant.
Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It's the Black Sea in a
midnight gale.—It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It's a blasted heath.—It's a
Hyperborean winter scene.—It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all
these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst. THAT once found out,
and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even
the great leviathan himself?
In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the
aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture
represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its
three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over
the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and
spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with
knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the
segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and
wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with
such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons
all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long lance, now wildly
elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And
that harpoon—so like a corkscrew now—was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale,
years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a
restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found
imbedded in the hump.
Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way—cut through what in old times
must have been a great central chimney with fireplaces all round—you enter the public room. A still
duskier place is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled planks
beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft's cockpits, especially of such a
howling night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long,
low, shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities gathered from this
wide world's remotest nooks. Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking
den—the bar—a rude attempt at a right whale's head. Be that how it may, there stands the vast
arched bone of the whale's jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive beneath it. Within are shabby
shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like
another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little withered old man,
who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death.
 Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without
—within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom.
Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads' goblets. Fill to THIS
mark, and your charge is but a penny; to THIS a penny more; and so on to the full glass—the Cape
Horn measure, which you may gulp down for a shilling.
Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about a table, examining
by a dim light divers specimens of SKRIMSHANDER. I sought the landlord, and telling him I
desired to be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full—not a bed
unoccupied. "But avast," he added, tapping his forehead, "you haint no objections to sharing a
harpooneer's blanket, have ye? I s'pose you are goin' a-whalin', so you'd better get used to that
sort of thing."
I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do so, it would depend upon
who the harpooneer might be, and that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the
harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander further about a strange town
on so bitter a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man's blanket.
"I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper? Supper'll be ready directly."
I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery. At one end a
ruminating tar was still further adorning it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working
away at the space between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but he didn't
make much headway, I thought.
At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room. It was cold as
Iceland—no fire at all—the landlord said he couldn't afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles,
each in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of
scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind—not only
meat and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in a
green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner.
"My boy," said the landlord, "you'll have the nightmare to a dead sartainty."
"Landlord," I whispered, "that aint the harpooneer is it?"
"Oh, no," said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, "the harpooneer is a dark complexioned
chap. He never eats dumplings, he don't—he eats nothing but steaks, and he likes 'em rare."
"The devil he does," says I. "Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?"
"He'll be here afore long," was the answer.
I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this "dark complexioned" harpooneer. At any
rate, I made up my mind that if it so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and
get into bed before I did.
Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what else to do with
myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker on.
Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried, "That's the
Grampus's crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a three years' voyage, and a full
ship. Hurrah, boys; now we'll have the latest news from the Feegees."
A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in rolled a wild set
of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in
woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an
eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat, and this was the first house
they entered. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale's mouth—the bar
—when the wrinkled little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all round.
One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin
and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never
mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side of
an ice-island.
The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with the arrantest topers
newly landed from sea, and they began capering about most obstreperously.
I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he seemed desirous not
to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from
making as much noise as the rest. This man interested me at once; and since the sea-gods had
ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a sleeping-partner one, so far as
this narrative is concerned), I will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six feet
in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a
man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in
the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy.
His voice at once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I thought he must
be one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry of his
companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I saw no more of
him till he became my comrade on the sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his
shipmates, and being, it seems, for some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised a cry of
"Bulkington! Bulkington! where's Bulkington?" and darted out of the house in pursuit of him.
It was now about nine o'clock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally quiet after these
orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the
entrance of the seamen.
No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not sleep with your
own brother. I don't know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it
comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger
a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a
sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors no more sleep two in a bed at
sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they all sleep together in one apartment, but you
have your own hammock, and cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your own skin.
The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the thought of sleeping with
him. It was fair to presume that being a harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be,
would not be of the tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over. Besides, it was
getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought to be home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he
should tumble in upon me at midnight—how could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming?
"Landlord! I've changed my mind about that harpooneer.—I shan't sleep with him. I'll try the bench
here."
"Just as you please; I'm sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress, and it's a plaguy rough
board here"—feeling of the knots and notches. "But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I've got a carpenter's
plane there in the bar—wait, I say, and I'll make ye snug enough." So saying he procured the plane;
and with his old silk handkerchief first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed,
the while grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at last the plane-iron came bump
against an indestructible knot. The landlord was near spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven's
sake to quit—the bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing in the
world could make eider down of a pine plank. So gathering up the shavings with another grin, and
throwing them into the great stove in the middle of the room, he went about his business, and left
me in a brown study.
I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too short; but that could be
mended with a chair. But it was a foot too narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four
inches higher than the planed one—so there was no yoking them. I then placed the first bench
lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall, leaving a little interval between, for my back
to settle down in. But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me from under
the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially as another current from the
rickety door met the one from the window, and both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in
the immediate vicinity of the spot where I had thought to spend the night.
The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn't I steal a march on him—bolt his door
inside, and jump into his bed, not to be wakened by the most violent knockings? It seemed no bad
idea; but upon second thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next morning, so
soon as I popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all ready to knock
me down!
Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending a sufferable night
unless in some other person's bed, I began to think that after all I might be cherishing
unwarrantable prejudices against this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I'll wait awhile; he must be
dropping in before long. I'll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good
bedfellows after all—there's no telling.
But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes, and going to bed, yet
no sign of my harpooneer.
"Landlord!" said I, "what sort of a chap is he—does he always keep such late hours?" It was now
hard upon twelve o'clock.
The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be mightily tickled at
something beyond my comprehension. "No," he answered, "generally he's an early bird—airley to
bed and airley to rise—yes, he's the bird what catches the worm. But to-night he went out a
peddling, you see, and I don't see what on airth keeps him so late, unless, may be, he can't sell his
head."
"Can't sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling me?" getting into
a towering rage. "Do you pretend to say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this
blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around this town?"
"That's precisely it," said the landlord, "and I told him he couldn't sell it here, the market's
overstocked."
"With what?" shouted I.
"With heads to be sure; ain't there too many heads in the world?"
"I tell you what it is, landlord," said I quite calmly, "you'd better stop spinning that yarn to me—I'm
not green."
"May be not," taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, "but I rayther guess you'll be done
BROWN if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin' his head."
"I'll break it for him," said I, now flying into a passion again at this unaccountable farrago of the
landlord's.
"It's broke a'ready," said he.
"Broke," said I—"BROKE, do you mean?"
"Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess."
"Landlord," said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a snow-storm—"landlord, stop
whittling. You and I must understand one another, and that too without delay. I come to your house
and want a bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half belongs to a certain
harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the
most mystifying and exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling towards
the man whom you design for my bedfellow—a sort of connexion, landlord, which is an intimate
and confidential one in the highest degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and
what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend the night with him. And
in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I
take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I've no idea of sleeping with a
madman; and you, sir, YOU I mean, landlord, YOU, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly,
would thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution."
"Wall," said the landlord, fetching a long breath, "that's a purty long sarmon for a chap that rips a
little now and then. But be easy, be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of has just
arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New Zealand heads (great
curios, you know), and he's sold all on 'em but one, and that one he's trying to sell to-night, cause
to-morrow's Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin' human heads about the streets when folks is
goin' to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was goin' out of the door
with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of inions."
This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed that the landlord,
after all, had had no idea of fooling me—but at the same time what could I think of a harpooneer
who stayed out of a Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal
business as selling the heads of dead idolators?
"Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man."
"He pays reg'lar," was the rejoinder. "But come, it's getting dreadful late, you had better be
turning flukes—it's a nice bed; Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. There's
plenty of room for two to kick about in that bed; it's an almighty big bed that. Why, afore we give it
up, Sal used to put our Sam and little Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling
about one night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his arm.
Arter that, Sal said it wouldn't do. Come along here, I'll give ye a glim in a jiffy;" and so saying he
lighted a candle and held it towards me, offering to lead the way. But I stood irresolute; when
looking at a clock in the corner, he exclaimed "I vum it's Sunday—you won't see that harpooneer
to-night; he's come to anchor somewhere—come along then; DO come; WON'T ye come?"
I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was ushered into a small
room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough, with a prodigious bed, almost big enough
indeed for any four harpooneers to sleep abreast.
"There," said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest that did double duty as a
wash-stand and centre table; "there, make yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye." I
turned round from eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.
Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the most elegant, it yet
stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced round the room; and besides the bedstead and
centre table, could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four walls, and
a papered fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of things not properly belonging to the
room, there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one corner; also a large
seaman's bag, containing the harpooneer's wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk. Likewise,
there was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf over the fire-place, and a tall harpoon
standing at the head of the bed.
But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the light, and felt it, and smelt it, and
tried every way possible to arrive at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to
nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags something like the
stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of this
mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos. But could it be possible that any sober
harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade the streets of any Christian town in that sort of
guise? I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and
thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a
rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my
life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.
I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this head-peddling
harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on the bed-side, I got up and took off my
monkey jacket, and then stood in the middle of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and
thought a little more in my shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now, half undressed as I
was, and remembering what the landlord said about the harpooneer's not coming home at all that
night, it being so very late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and
then blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and commended myself to the care of heaven.
Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no telling, but I
rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time. At last I slid off into a light doze, and
had pretty nearly made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I heard a heavy footfall in the
passage, and saw a glimmer of light come into the room from under the door.
Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal head-peddler. But I lay perfectly
still, and resolved not to say a word till spoken to. Holding a light in one hand, and that identical
New Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and without looking towards the
bed, placed his candle a good way off from me on the floor in one corner, and then began working
away at the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the room. I was all
eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted for some time while employed in unlacing the
bag's mouth. This accomplished, however, he turned round—when, good heavens! what a sight!
Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large blackish
looking squares. Yes, it's just as I thought, he's a terrible bedfellow; he's been in a fight, got
dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced to turn his face
so towards the light, that I plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black squares
on his cheeks. They were stains of some sort or other. At first I knew not what to make of this; but
soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of a white man—a whaleman too
—who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I concluded that this harpooneer,
in the course of his distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure. And what is it, thought
I, after all! It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. But then, what to make of
his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and completely independent of
the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I
never heard of a hot sun's tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one. However, I had never
been in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary effects upon the
skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me like lightning, this harpooneer never
noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it,
and presently pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing these
on the old chest in the middle of the room, he then took the New Zealand head—a ghastly thing
enough—and crammed it down into the bag. He now took off his hat—a new beaver hat—when I
came nigh singing out with fresh surprise. There was no hair on his head—none to speak of at
least—nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head now
looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. Had not the stranger stood between me and the door,
I would have bolted out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.
Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but it was the second floor
back. I am no coward, but what to make of this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my
comprehension. Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded
about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had
thus broken into my room at the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game
enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed
inexplicable in him.
Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his chest and arms. As
I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face; his back, too,
was all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years' War, and just
escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of
dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms. It was now quite plain that he must be
some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so
landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it. A peddler of heads too—perhaps the heads
of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to mine—heavens! look at that tomahawk!
 But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about something that completely
fascinated my attention, and convinced me that he must indeed be a heathen. Going to his heavy
grego, or wrapall, or dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the
pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with a hunch on its back, and
exactly the colour of a three days' old Congo baby. Remembering the embalmed head, at first I
almost thought that this black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner. But
seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal like polished ebony, I
concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to be. For now the
savage goes up to the empty fire-place, and removing the papered fire-board, sets up this little
hunch-backed image, like a tenpin, between the andirons. The chimney jambs and all the bricks
inside were very sooty, so that I thought this fire-place made a very appropriate little shrine or
chapel for his Congo idol.
I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but ill at ease meantime—to
see what was next to follow. First he takes about a double handful of shavings out of his grego
pocket, and places them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on top and
applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after
many hasty snatches into the fire, and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he seemed
to be scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing out the biscuit; then blowing off the
heat and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of it to the little negro. But the little devil did not seem
to fancy such dry sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips. All these strange antics were
accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from the devotee, who seemed to be praying in a
sing-song or else singing some pagan psalmody or other, during which his face twitched about in
the most unnatural manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very unceremoniously,
and bagged it again in his grego pocket as carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead
woodcock.
All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and seeing him now exhibiting
strong symptoms of concluding his business operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it
was high time, now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell in which I had so long
been bound.
But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one. Taking up his tomahawk from
the table, he examined the head of it for an instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth at
the handle, he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke. The next moment the light was
extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth, sprang into bed with me. I sang
out, I could not help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.
Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him against the wall, and then
conjured him, whoever or whatever he might be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp
again. But his guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill comprehended my meaning.
"Who-e debel you?"—he at last said—"you no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e." And so saying the
lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the dark.
"Landlord, for God's sake, Peter Coffin!" shouted I. "Landlord! Watch! Coffin! Angels! save me!"
"Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!" again growled the cannibal, while his
horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen
would get on fire. But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the room light in hand,
and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.
"Don't be afraid now," said he, grinning again, "Queequeg here wouldn't harm a hair of your
head."
"Stop your grinning," shouted I, "and why didn't you tell me that that infernal harpooneer was a
cannibal?"
"I thought ye know'd it;—didn't I tell ye, he was a peddlin' heads around town?—but turn flukes
again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look here—you sabbee me, I sabbee—you this man sleepe you
—you sabbee?"
"Me sabbee plenty"—grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and sitting up in bed.
"You gettee in," he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing the clothes to one
side. He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him
a moment. For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What's all
this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself—the man's a human being just as I am: he
has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober
cannibal than a drunken Christian.
"Landlord," said I, "tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or whatever you call it; tell him
to stop smoking, in short, and I will turn in with him. But I don't fancy having a man smoking in bed
with me. It's dangerous. Besides, I ain't insured."
This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely motioned me to get into
bed—rolling over to one side as much as to say—"I won't touch a leg of ye."
"Good night, landlord," said I, "you may go."
I turned in, and never slept better in my life.
 CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.
Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most
loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was
of patchwork, full of odd little parti-coloured squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all
over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise
shade—owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt
sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times—this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world
like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke,
I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense
of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.
My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a child, I well remember a
somewhat similar circumstance that befell me; whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could
entirely settle. The circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper or other—I think it was
trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my
stepmother who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed
supperless,—my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to bed,
though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon of the 21st June, the longest day in the year in our
hemisphere. I felt dreadfully. But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the
third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got
between the sheets.
I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse before I could hope for a
resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed! the small of my back ached to think of it. And it was so light too;
the sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the streets, and the sound of
gay voices all over the house. I felt worse and worse—at last I got up, dressed, and softly going
down in my stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself at her feet,
beseeching her as a particular favour to give me a good slippering for my misbehaviour; anything
indeed but condemning me to lie abed such an unendurable length of time. But she was the best
and most conscientious of stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For several hours I lay
there broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I have ever done since, even from the greatest
subsequent misfortunes. At last I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly
waking from it—half steeped in dreams—I opened my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now
wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be
seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung
over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand
belonged, seemed closely seated by my bed-side. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay
there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I
could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken. I knew not how this consciousness
at last glided away from me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for
days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the
mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle myself with it.
Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the supernatural hand in mine were
very similar, in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing
Queequeg's pagan arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night's events soberly recurred,
one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. For though I tried to
move his arm—unlock his bridegroom clasp—yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly,
as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to rouse him—"Queequeg!"—but his
only answer was a snore. I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and
suddenly felt a slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by
the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a
strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! "Queequeg!—in the name of
goodness, Queequeg, wake!" At length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant
expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of
style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over
like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me,
and rubbing his eyes as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim
consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him. Meanwhile, I lay
quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings now, and bent upon narrowly observing so curious
a creature. When, at last, his mind seemed made up touching the character of his bedfellow, and
he became, as it were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain signs
and sounds gave me to understand that, if it pleased me, he would dress first and then leave me to
dress afterwards, leaving the whole apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg, under the
circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but, the truth is, these savages have an innate
sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous how essentially polite they are. I pay this
particular compliment to Queequeg, because he treated me with so much civility and
consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness; staring at him from the bed, and watching all his
toilette motions; for the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding. Nevertheless, a man
like Queequeg you don't see every day, he and his ways were well worth unusual regarding.
He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall one, by the by, and then
—still minus his trowsers—he hunted up his boots. What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot
tell, but his next movement was to crush himself—boots in hand, and hat on—under the bed; when,
from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I inferred he was hard at work booting himself; though
by no law of propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be private when putting on his
boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition stage—neither caterpillar nor
butterfly. He was just enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible
manners. His education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not been a
small degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled himself with boots at all; but then,
if he had not been still a savage, he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them
on. At last, he emerged with his hat very much dented and crushed down over his eyes, and began
creaking and limping about the room, as if, not being much accustomed to boots, his pair of damp,
wrinkled cowhide ones—probably not made to order either—rather pinched and tormented him at
the first go off of a bitter cold morning.
Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the street being very narrow, the
house opposite commanded a plain view into the room, and observing more and more the
indecorous figure that Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on; I
begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat, and particularly to get into his
pantaloons as soon as possible. He complied, and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in
the morning any Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to my amazement,
contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms, and hands. He then donned his
waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on the wash-stand centre table, dipped it into water
and commenced lathering his face. I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and
behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long wooden stock, unsheathes the
head, whets it a little on his boot, and striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall, begins a
vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers's
best cutlery with a vengeance. Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I came to
know of what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp the long
straight edges are always kept.
The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of the room, wrapped up in
his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon like a marshal's baton.
 CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.
I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the grinning landlord very
pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him, though he had been skylarking with me not a little in
the matter of my bedfellow.
However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's
the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let
him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the
man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you
perhaps think for.
The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the night previous, and
whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and
second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and
harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn,
shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.
You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This young fellow's healthy
cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have
been three days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you
might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but
slightly bleached withal; HE doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show a
cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes' western slope, to
show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone.
"Grub, ho!" now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went to breakfast.
They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in manner, quite self-
possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo
Park, the Scotch one; of all men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the
mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or the taking a long solitary
walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo's
performances—this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining a high social
polish. Still, for the most part, that sort of thing is to be had anywhere.
These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that after we were all seated at
the table, and I was preparing to hear some good stories about whaling; to my no small surprise,
nearly every man maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they looked embarrassed.
Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded
great whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking;
and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same calling, all of kindred tastes
—looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some
sheepfold among the Green Mountains. A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior
whalemen!
But as for Queequeg—why, Queequeg sat there among them—at the head of the table, too, it so
chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I cannot say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer
could not have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and using it there
without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and
grappling the beefsteaks towards him. But THAT was certainly very coolly done by him, and every
one knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.
We will not speak of all Queequeg's peculiarities here; how he eschewed coffee and hot rolls,
and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was
over he withdrew like the rest into the public room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting
there quietly digesting and smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I sallied out for a stroll.
 CHAPTER 6. The Street.
If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an individual as Queequeg
circulating among the polite society of a civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon
taking my first daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.
In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer to view the
queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets,
Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not unknown
to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the
natives. But New Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you
see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages
outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.
But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians,
and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you
will see other sights still more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town
scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery.
They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop
the axe and snatch the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they
came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look there! that chap strutting
round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and
sheath-knife. Here comes another with a sou'-wester and a bombazine cloak.
No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one—I mean a downright bumpkin dandy
—a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his
hands. Now when a country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a distinguished
reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the comical things he does upon
reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps
to his canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps in the first howling
gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest.
But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and bumpkins to show her
visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of
land would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador. As it is,
parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they look so bony. The town itself is perhaps
the dearest place to live in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like Canaan;
a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave
them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like
houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted
upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?
Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your
question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the
Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from
the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?
In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their
nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for,
they say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in
spermaceti candles.
In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples—long avenues of green and gold.
And in August, high in air, the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the
passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in
many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse
rocks thrown aside at creation's final day.
 And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in
summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens.
Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls
breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were
drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.
 CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.
In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman's Chapel, and few are the moody
fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the
spot. I am sure that I did not.
Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this special errand. The sky had
changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of
the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I found a small
scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors' wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only
broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart
from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet
arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble
tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran
something like the following, but I do not pretend to quote:—
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN TALBOT, Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost
overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, November 1st, 1836. THIS TABLET Is
erected to his Memory BY HIS SISTER.
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN,
WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY, AND SAMUEL GLEIG, Forming one of the boats' crews OF THE
SHIP ELIZA Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the Off-shore Ground in the PACIFIC,
December 31st, 1839. THIS MARBLE Is here placed by their surviving SHIPMATES.
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows of his
boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, AUGUST 3d, 1833. THIS TABLET Is
erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW.
Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself near the door, and
turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene,
there was a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage was the only
person present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only one who could not
read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the
relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew
not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several women
present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that
here before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets
sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.
Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say
—here, HERE lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What
bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those
immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw
upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a
grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.
In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is that a universal
proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin
Sands; how it is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so
significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for the remotest
Indies of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals;
in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died
sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we
nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the
dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are
not without their meanings.
 But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers
her most vital hope.
It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded
those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the
whalemen who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I
grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems—aye, a
stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a
speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have
hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on
earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters
observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my
body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And
therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for
stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
 CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.
I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable robustness entered;
immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of
him by all the congregation, sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it was
the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he was a very great favourite.
He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life
to the ministry. At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old
age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for among all the
fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom—the spring
verdure peeping forth even beneath February's snow. No one having previously heard his history,
could for the first time behold Father Mapple without the utmost interest, because there were
certain engrafted clerical peculiarities about him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life he
had led. When he entered I observed that he carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come in his
carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket seemed
almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it had absorbed. However, hat and coat
and overshoes were one by one removed, and hung up in a little space in an adjacent corner;
when, arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the pulpit.
Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a regular stairs to such a
height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously contract the already small area of the chapel,
the architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit without a
stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at
sea. The wife of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted
man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany colour,
the whole contrivance, considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad
taste. Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping the ornamental
knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly sailor-like but
still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his
vessel.
The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case with swinging ones, were of
cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of wood, so that at every step there was a joint. At my first
glimpse of the pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a ship, these joints in the
present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining
the height, slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder step by
step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec.
I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this. Father Mapple enjoyed
such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity, that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by
any mere tricks of the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober reason for this thing;
furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen. Can it be, then, that by that act of physical
isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and
connexions? Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the word, to the faithful man of God,
this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold—a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of
water within the walls.
But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place, borrowed from the chaplain's
former sea-farings. Between the marble cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which
formed its back was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship beating against a
terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy breakers. But high above the flying scud
and dark-rolling clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel's
face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the ship's tossed deck, something
like that silver plate now inserted into the Victory's plank where Nelson fell. "Ah, noble ship," the
angel seemed to say, "beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is
breaking through; the clouds are rolling off—serenest azure is at hand."
 Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that had achieved the ladder and
the picture. Its panelled front was in the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested
on a projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's fiddle-headed beak.
What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest
comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first
descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul
is first invoked for favourable winds. Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage
complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
 CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.
Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the scattered people
to condense. "Starboard gangway, there! side away to larboard—larboard gangway to starboard!
Midships! midships!"
There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still slighter shuffling of
women's shoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on the preacher.
He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his large brown hands across his
chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling
and praying at the bottom of the sea.
This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is
foundering at sea in a fog—in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn; but changing
his manner towards the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy—

"The ribs and terrors in the whale,

Arched over me a dismal gloom,
While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by,
And lift me deepening down to doom.

"I saw the opening maw of hell,

With endless pains and sorrows there;
Which none but they that feel can tell—
Oh, I was plunging to despair.

"In black distress, I called my God,

When I could scarce believe him mine,
He bowed his ear to my complaints—
No more the whale did me confine.

"With speed he flew to my relief,

As on a radiant dolphin borne;
Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
The face of my Deliverer God.

"My song for ever shall record

That terrible, that joyful hour;
I give the glory to my God,
His all the mercy and the power."

Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the howling of the storm. A brief
pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand
down upon the proper page, said: "Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of
Jonah—'And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.'"
"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is one of the smallest strands
in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sealine
sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's
belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with
him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But
WHAT is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a
lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a
lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the
swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all
sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of
God—never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed—which he found a hard
command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that
—and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must
disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God
consists.
"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by seeking to flee from
Him. He thinks that a ship made by men will carry him into countries where God does not reign, but
only the Captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that's
bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all accounts
Tarshish could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz. That's the opinion of learned men.
And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could
possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea.
Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean,
the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that, just
outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide
from God? Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and
guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to
cross the seas. So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in
those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched
a deck. How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,—no friends
accompany him to the wharf with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds the
Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps on board to see its Captain in
the cabin, all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger's
evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confidence; in vain essays his
wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners he can be no innocent. In their
gamesome but still serious way, one whispers to the other—"Jack, he's robbed a widow;" or, "Joe,
do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry lad, I guess he's the adulterer that broke jail in old
Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom." Another runs to read the bill
that's stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold
coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and containing a description of his person. He reads,
and looks from Jonah to the bill; while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah,
prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his boldness to
his face, only looks so much the more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected; but that
itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of it; and when the sailors find him not to be the
man that is advertised, they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin.
"'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out his papers for the
Customs—'Who's there?' Oh! how that harmless question mangles Jonah! For the instant he
almost turns to flee again. But he rallies. 'I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon sail
ye, sir?' Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up to Jonah, though the man now stands before
him; but no sooner does he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. 'We sail with
the next coming tide,' at last he slowly answered, still intently eyeing him. 'No sooner, sir?'—'Soon
enough for any honest man that goes a passenger.' Ha! Jonah, that's another stab. But he swiftly
calls away the Captain from that scent. 'I'll sail with ye,'—he says,—'the passage money how much
is that?—I'll pay now.' For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be
overlooked in this history, 'that he paid the fare thereof' ere the craft did sail. And taken with the
context, this is full of meaning.
"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose
cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel
freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. So Jonah's
Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah's purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him
thrice the usual sum; and it's assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at
the same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. Yet when Jonah fairly takes out
his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not
a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage. 'Point out my state-room,
Sir,' says Jonah now, 'I'm travel-weary; I need sleep.' 'Thou lookest like it,' says the Captain, 'there's
thy room.' Jonah enters, and would lock the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing him
foolishly fumbling there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about the
doors of convicts' cells being never allowed to be locked within. All dressed and dusty as he is,
Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting on his
forehead. The air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the
ship's water-line, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall
hold him in the smallest of his bowels' wards.
"Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah's room; and
the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame
and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room;
though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it
hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes roll round the
place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance. But that
contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all
awry. 'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, 'straight upwards, so it burns; but the
chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!'
"Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still reeling, but with conscience
yet pricking him, as the plungings of the Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel
tags into him; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy anguish, praying God
for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor
steals over him, as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there's
naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth, Jonah's prodigy of ponderous misery
drags him drowning down to sleep.
"And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and from the deserted wharf
the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening, glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of
recorded smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked
burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to break. But now when the boatswain calls all
hands to lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard; when the wind is
shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah's
head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and raging
sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale,
which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone
down into the sides of the ship—a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep. But
the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear, 'What meanest thou, O, sleeper!
arise!' Startled from his lethargy by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the
deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he is sprung upon by a
panther billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no
speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat. And
ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness
overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward
again towards the tormented deep.
"Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is
now too plainly known. The sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him,
and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter to high Heaven, they fall to casting
lots, to see for whose cause this great tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah's; that discovered,
then how furiously they mob him with their questions. 'What is thine occupation? Whence comest
thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now, my shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah. The
eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where from; whereas, they not only receive an answer
to those questions, but likewise another answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited
answer is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.
"'I am a Hebrew,' he cries—and then—'I fear the Lord the God of Heaven who hath made the
sea and the dry land!' Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou fear the Lord God THEN!
Straightway, he now goes on to make a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more and
more appalled, but still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating God for mercy, since he but
too well knew the darkness of his deserts,—when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him
and cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for HIS sake this great tempest was upon them;
they mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means to save the ship. But all in vain; the
indignant gale howls louder; then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the other they not
unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah.
"And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea; when instantly an oily
calmness floats out from the east, and the sea is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him,
leaving smooth water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion
that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and
the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed
unto the Lord out of the fish's belly. But observe his prayer, and learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as
he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is
just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and
pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful
repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was
this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale.
Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you
as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah."
While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking, slanting storm without seemed
to add new power to the preacher, who, when describing Jonah's sea-storm, seemed tossed by a
storm himself. His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the warring
elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping
from his eye, made all his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to them.
There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves of the Book once more;
and, at last, standing motionless, with closed eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God
and himself.
But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly, with an aspect of the
deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these words:
"Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me. I have read ye
by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye,
and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down from
this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one
of you reads ME that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to ME, as a pilot of the
living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord
to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility
he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at
Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him
in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him
along 'into the midst of the seas,' where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms
down, and 'the weeds were wrapped about his head,' and all the watery world of woe bowled over
him. Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet—'out of the belly of hell'—when the whale
grounded upon the ocean's utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet
when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the
sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air
and earth; and 'vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of the Lord came a second
time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring
of the ocean—Jonah did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the
Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
"This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it.
Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the
waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to
appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this
world, courts not dishonour! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were
salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a
castaway!"
He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to them again, showed
a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm,—"But oh! shipmates! on the
starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the
bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a
far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth,
ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him,
when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who
gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under
the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no
law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the
waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the
Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with
his final breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die. I have
striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to
Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?"
He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his hands, and so
remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place.
 CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.
Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there quite alone; he having left
the Chapel before the benediction some time. He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his
feet on the stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face that little negro idol of
his; peering hard into its face, and with a jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile
humming to himself in his heathenish way.
But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going to the table, took up a
large book there, and placing it on his lap began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at
every fiftieth page—as I fancied—stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and giving
utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He would then begin again at the next
fifty; seeming to commence at number one each time, as though he could not count more than fifty,
and it was only by such a large number of fifties being found together, that his astonishment at the
multitude of pages was excited.
With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the
face—at least to my taste—his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means
disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the
traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed
tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty
bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a
man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being
shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it
otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an
excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen
in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the
brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top.
Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be looking out at the storm
from the casement, he never heeded my presence, never troubled himself with so much as a
single glance; but appeared wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous book.
Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the night previous, and especially
considering the affectionate arm I had found thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought
this indifference of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not know
exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity
seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very
little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no
desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon
second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty
thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is—which was the only way he could get
there—thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he
seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship;
always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never
heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not
be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself
out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have "broken his
digester."
As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that mild stage when, after its first
intensity has warmed the air, it then only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms
gathering round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain; the storm booming
without in solemn swells; I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more
my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing
savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there
lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I
began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have
repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I'll try a pagan friend, thought I,
since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made
some friendly signs and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little noticed
these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night's hospitalities, he made out to ask
me whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased,
perhaps a little complimented.
We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to him the purpose of the
printing, and the meaning of the few pictures that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and
from that we went to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen in this
famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and, producing his pouch and tomahawk, he
quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping
it regularly passing between us.
If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's breast, this pleasant, genial
smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally
and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine,
clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's
phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a
countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be
much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply.
After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room together. He made me a
present of his embalmed head; took out his enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the
tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and mechanically
dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them towards me, and said it was mine. I was
going to remonstrate; but he silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers' pockets. I let them
stay. He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed the paper fireboard.
By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious for me to join him; but well knowing
what was to follow, I deliberated a moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or
otherwise.
I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How
then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship?
thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth—pagans
and all included—can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But
what is worship?—to do the will of God—THAT is worship. And what is the will of God?—to do to
my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me—THAT is the will of God. Now,
Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite
with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in
his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol;
offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and
that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world.
But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends.
Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old
couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon,
lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.
 CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.
We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then
affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely
sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what little
nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-
break was yet some way down the future.
Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position began to grow
wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us,
leaning against the head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two noses
bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug, the more
so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in
the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be
cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in
itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you
cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your
nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness
you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should
never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of
this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and
the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at once I thought I would
open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake,
I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of
being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if
darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our
clayey part. Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant and self-created
darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated twelve-o'clock-at-night, I
experienced a disagreeable revulsion. Nor did I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that
perhaps it were best to strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt a
strong desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it said, that though I had felt such a
strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff
prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than to have
Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such serene household
joy then. I no more felt unduly concerned for the landlord's policy of insurance. I was only alive to the
condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend. With
our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed the Tomahawk from one to the
other, till slowly there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the
new-lit lamp.
Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far distant scenes, I know
not, but he now spoke of his native island; and, eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on
and tell it. He gladly complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his words, yet
subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now
enable me to present the whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.
 CHAPTER 12. Biographical.
Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in
any map; true places never are.
When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a grass clout, followed
by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul,
lurked a strong desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His
father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal side he boasted
aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins—royal
stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth.
A Sag Harbor ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg sought a passage to Christian lands.
But the ship, having her full complement of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his
father's influence could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to
a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when she quitted the island. On one side
was a coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out
into the water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat
down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out;
gained her side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the
chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and swore not
to let it go, though hacked in pieces.
In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a cutlass over his naked
wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate
dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and told him
he might make himself at home. But this fine young savage—this sea Prince of Wales, never saw
the Captain's cabin. They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like
Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming
ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen. For
at bottom—so he told me—he was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians,
the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were; and more than that, still better
than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians
could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father's heathens. Arrived at last
in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and
seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought
he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.
And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore their clothes, and
tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home.
By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having a coronation; since he
might now consider his father dead and gone, he being very old and feeble at the last accounts. He
answered no, not yet; and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted
him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him. But by and by, he
said, he would return,—as soon as he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he
proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They had made a harpooneer of
him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.
I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future movements. He
answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon this, I told him that whaling was my own
design, and informed him of my intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port
for an adventurous whaleman to embark from. He at once resolved to accompany me to that
island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with
me, in short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both
worlds. To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now felt for Queequeg, he was an
experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me,
was wholly ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as known to
merchant seamen.
His story being ended with his pipe's last dying puff, Queequeg embraced me, pressed his
forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that,
and very soon were sleeping.
 CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.
Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber, for a block, I settled
my own and comrade's bill; using, however, my comrade's money. The grinning landlord, as well as
the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between
me and Queequeg—especially as Peter Coffin's cock and bull stories about him had previously so
much alarmed me concerning the very person whom I now companied with.
We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor carpet-bag, and
Queequeg's canvas sack and hammock, away we went down to "the Moss," the little Nantucket
packet schooner moored at the wharf. As we were going along the people stared; not at
Queequeg so much—for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their streets,—but at
seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But we heeded them not, going along wheeling
the barrow by turns, and Queequeg now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon
barbs. I asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and whether all
whaling ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in substance, he replied, that though what I
hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular affection for his own harpoon, because it was of
assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales. In
short, like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers' meadows armed with their
own scythes—though in no wise obliged to furnish them—even so, Queequeg, for his own private
reasons, preferred his own harpoon.
Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about the first wheelbarrow he
had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to
carry his heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the thing—though in truth
he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage the barrow—Queequeg puts
his chest upon it; lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. "Why,"
said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn't the people
laugh?"
Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Rokovoko, it seems, at their
wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a
punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided mat where
the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its
commander—from all accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain
—this commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg's sister, a pretty young princess
just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at the bride's bamboo
cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honour, placed himself over
against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg's father.
Grace being said,—for those people have their grace as well as we—though Queequeg told me
that unlike us, who at such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the
ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts—Grace, I say, being said, the High Priest
opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and
consecrating fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed
next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself—being Captain of a ship—as
having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King's own house—the Captain
coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl;—taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass.
"Now," said Queequeg, "what you tink now?—Didn't our people laugh?"
At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner. Hoisting sail, it glided
down the Acushnet river. On one side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered
trees all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled upon
her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at
last; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and
forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous
and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so
on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.
Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little Moss tossed the quick
foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings. How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned
that turnpike earth!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and
hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records.
At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me. His dusky nostrils
swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth. On, on we flew; and our offing gained, the
Moss did homage to the blast; ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways
leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the two tall masts buckling like
Indian canes in land tornadoes. So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging
bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a lubber-like
assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so companionable; as though a white
man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies and
bumpkins there, who, by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all
verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him behind his back. I thought
the bumpkin's hour of doom was come. Dropping his harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in
his arms, and by an almost miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into the air;
then slightly tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with bursting lungs upon his feet,
while Queequeg, turning his back upon him, lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a
puff.
"Capting! Capting!" yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer; "Capting, Capting, here's
the devil."
"Hallo, you sir," cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking up to Queequeg, "what in
thunder do you mean by that? Don't you know you might have killed that chap?"
"What him say?" said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.
"He say," said I, "that you came near kill-e that man there," pointing to the still shivering
greenhorn.
"Kill-e," cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly expression of disdain, "ah!
him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!"
"Look you," roared the Captain, "I'll kill-e YOU, you cannibal, if you try any more of your tricks
aboard here; so mind your eye."
But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to mind his own eye. The
prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was
now flying from side to side, completely sweeping the entire after part of the deck. The poor fellow
whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept overboard; all hands were in a panic; and to
attempt snatching at the boom to stay it, seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and back
again, almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point of snapping into
splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of being done; those on deck rushed
towards the bows, and stood eyeing the boom as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale.
In the midst of this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and crawling under the
path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks, and then flinging the
other like a lasso, caught it round the boom as it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar
was that way trapped, and all was safe. The schooner was run into the wind, and while the hands
were clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg, stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a
long living arc of a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog, throwing his
long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing his brawny shoulders through the freezing
foam. I looked at the grand and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had
gone down. Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now took an instant's
glance around him, and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and disappeared. A
few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out, and with the other dragging a
lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands voted
Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like
a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.
Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all deserved a medal
from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only asked for water—fresh water—something
to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the
bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to himself—"It's a mutual,
joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians."
 CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a fine run, we safely
arrived in Nantucket.
Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how
it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it—a mere
hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you
would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you
that they have to plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that
they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in
Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools
before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an
oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like
Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and
made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will
sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show
that Nantucket is no Illinois.
Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by the red-men. Thus
goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried
off an infant Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child borne out of sight over
the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the same direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a
perilous passage they discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket,—the
poor little Indian's skeleton.
What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a
livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets
for mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last, launching
a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of
circumnavigations round it; peeped in at Behring's Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans
declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most
monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon, clothed with such
portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most
fearless and malicious assaults!
And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the
sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them
the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add
Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out
their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For
the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way
through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates
and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships,
other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the
bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible
language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. THERE is
his home; THERE lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it
overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides
among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the
land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon
would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep
between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to
his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
 CHAPTER 15. Chowder.
It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly to anchor, and Queequeg and I
went ashore; so we could attend to no business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. The
landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the Try Pots,
whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one of the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, and
moreover he had assured us that Cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders. In
short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck at the Try Pots. But the
directions he had given us about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we
opened a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a
corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first man we met where the place
was: these crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset,
Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse—our first point of departure—must be left on the
larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard. However, by
dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to
inquire the way, we at last came to something which there was no mistaking.
Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses' ears, swung from the
cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees
were sawed off on the other side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows.
Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I could not help staring at this
gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining
horns; yes, TWO of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It's ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my
Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's
chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out
oblique hints touching Tophet?
I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman with yellow hair and a yellow
gown, standing in the porch of the inn, under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like
an injured eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen shirt.
"Get along with ye," said she to the man, "or I'll be combing ye!"
"Come on, Queequeg," said I, "all right. There's Mrs. Hussey."
And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs. Hussey entirely
competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs.
Hussey, postponing further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little room, and seating us at
a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded repast, turned round to us and said—"Clam
or Cod?"
"What's that about Cods, ma'am?" said I, with much politeness.
"Clam or Cod?" she repeated.
"A clam for supper? a cold clam; is THAT what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?" says I, "but that's a
rather cold and clammy reception in the winter time, ain't it, Mrs. Hussey?"
But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple Shirt, who was waiting for it
in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing but the word "clam," Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an
open door leading to the kitchen, and bawling out "clam for two," disappeared.
"Queequeg," said I, "do you think that we can make out a supper for us both on one clam?"
However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless
prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully
explained. Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger
than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole
enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened
by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food before him, and
the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great expedition: when leaning
back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey's clam and cod announcement, I thought I would
try a little experiment. Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word "cod" with great emphasis,
and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savoury steam came forth again, but with a different
flavor, and in good time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us.
We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I to myself, I wonder now
if this here has any effect on the head? What's that stultifying saying about chowder-headed
people? "But look, Queequeg, ain't that a live eel in your bowl? Where's your harpoon?"
Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its name; for the pots there
were always boiling chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for
supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area before the
house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and
Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to
the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the
beach among some fishermen's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and
marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I
assure ye.
Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey concerning the nearest
way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to precede me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her
arm, and demanded his harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. "Why not?" said I;
"every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon—but why not?" "Because it's dangerous," says she.
"Ever since young Stiggs coming from that unfort'nt v'y'ge of his, when he was gone four years and
a half, with only three barrels of ile, was found dead in my first floor back, with his harpoon in his
side; ever since then I allow no boarders to take sich dangerous weepons in their rooms at night.
So, Mr. Queequeg" (for she had learned his name), "I will just take this here iron, and keep it for
you till morning. But the chowder; clam or cod to-morrow for breakfast, men?"
"Both," says I; "and let's have a couple of smoked herring by way of variety."
 CHAPTER 16. The Ship.
In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and no small concern,
Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been diligently consulting Yojo—the name of
his black little god—and Yojo had told him two or three times over, and strongly insisted upon it
everyway, that instead of our going together among the whaling-fleet in harbor, and in concert
selecting our craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should
rest wholly with me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us; and, in order to do so, had already
pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself, I, Ishmael, should infallibly light upon, for all the world
as though it had turned out by chance; and in that vessel I must immediately ship myself, for the
present irrespective of Queequeg.
I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed great confidence in the
excellence of Yojo's judgment and surprising forecast of things; and cherished Yojo with
considerable esteem, as a rather good sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the
whole, but in all cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs.
Now, this plan of Queequeg's, or rather Yojo's, touching the selection of our craft; I did not like
that plan at all. I had not a little relied upon Queequeg's sagacity to point out the whaler best fitted
to carry us and our fortunes securely. But as all my remonstrances produced no effect upon
Queequeg, I was obliged to acquiesce; and accordingly prepared to set about this business with a
determined rushing sort of energy and vigor, that should quickly settle that trifling little affair. Next
morning early, leaving Queequeg shut up with Yojo in our little bedroom—for it seemed that it was
some sort of Lent or Ramadan, or day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo
that day; HOW it was I never could find out, for, though I applied myself to it several times, I never
could master his liturgies and XXXIX Articles—leaving Queequeg, then, fasting on his tomahawk
pipe, and Yojo warming himself at his sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among the shipping.
After much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt that there were three ships up
for three-years' voyages—The Devil-dam, the Tit-bit, and the Pequod. DEVIL-DAM, I do not know
the origin of; TIT-BIT is obvious; PEQUOD, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a
celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct as the ancient Medes. I peered and pryed
about the Devil-dam; from her, hopped over to the Tit-bit; and finally, going on board the Pequod,
looked around her for a moment, and then decided that this was the very ship for us.
You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know;—square-toed luggers;
mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never
saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old school, rather
small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned and weather-
stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a
French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable bows looked
bearded. Her masts—cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost
overboard in a gale—her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne.
Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury
Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous
features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed. Old
Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and
now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod,—this old Peleg, during the
term of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a
quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved
buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with
pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth
in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like
one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten
her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but
deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she
sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower
jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar,
when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a most
melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.
Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority, in order to propose
myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I saw nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange
sort of tent, or rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It seemed only a temporary
erection used in port. It was of a conical shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge
slabs of limber black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale.
Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced together, mutually sloped
towards each other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved to
and fro like the top-knot on some old Pottowottamie Sachem's head. A triangular opening faced
towards the bows of the ship, so that the insider commanded a complete view forward.
And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by his aspect seemed to
have authority; and who, it being noon, and the ship's work suspended, was now enjoying respite
from the burden of command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all over
with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of a stout interlacing of the same elastic
stuff of which the wigwam was constructed.
There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of the elderly man I saw;
he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen, and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the
Quaker style; only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest wrinkles
interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his continual sailings in many hard gales,
and always looking to windward;—for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed
together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.
"Is this the Captain of the Pequod?" said I, advancing to the door of the tent.
"Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?" he demanded.
"I was thinking of shipping."
"Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer—ever been in a stove boat?"
"No, Sir, I never have."
"Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say—eh?
"Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I've been several voyages in the merchant
service, and I think that—"
"Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that leg?—I'll take that leg
away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of the marchant service to me again. Marchant service
indeed! I suppose now ye feel considerable proud of having served in those marchant ships. But
flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?—it looks a little suspicious, don't it, eh?
—Hast not been a pirate, hast thou?—Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?—Dost not think of
murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?"
I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask of these half humorous
innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular
prejudices, and rather distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the Vineyard.
"But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of shipping ye."
"Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world."
"Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?"
"Who is Captain Ahab, sir?"
 "Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship."
"I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself."
"Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg—that's who ye are speaking to, young man. It belongs to
me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted out for the voyage, and supplied with all her
needs, including crew. We are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if thou wantest to
know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way of finding it out before ye bind
yourself to it, past backing out. Clap eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he
has only one leg."
"What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?"
"Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured, chewed up, crunched by the
monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a boat!—ah, ah!"
I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at the hearty grief in his
concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as I could, "What you say is no doubt true enough, sir;
but how could I know there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale, though indeed I might
have inferred as much from the simple fact of the accident."
"Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d'ye see; thou dost not talk shark a bit.
SURE, ye've been to sea before now; sure of that?"
"Sir," said I, "I thought I told you that I had been four voyages in the merchant—"
"Hard down out of that! Mind what I said about the marchant service—don't aggravate me—I
won't have it. But let us understand each other. I have given thee a hint about what whaling is; do ye
yet feel inclined for it?"
"I do, sir."
"Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale's throat, and then jump
after it? Answer, quick!"
"I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to be got rid of, that is; which I
don't take to be the fact."
"Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to find out by experience what
whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to see the world? Was not that what ye said? I thought
so. Well then, just step forward there, and take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back to me
and tell me what ye see there."
For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not knowing exactly how to take it,
whether humorously or in earnest. But concentrating all his crow's feet into one scowl, Captain
Peleg started me on the errand.
Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship swinging to her
anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was
unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see.
"Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back; "what did ye see?"
"Not much," I replied—"nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and there's a squall
coming up, I think."
"Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see
any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world where you stand?"
I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and the Pequod was as good a
ship as any—I thought the best—and all this I now repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined,
he expressed his willingness to ship me.
 "And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off," he added—"come along with ye." And so
saying, he led the way below deck into the cabin.
Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and surprising figure. It
turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of
the vessel; the other shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd of old
annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each owning about the value of a
timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money
in whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing in good
interest.
Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker, the island having
been originally settled by that sect; and to this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon
measure the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by things
altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of
all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.
So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture names—a
singularly common fashion on the island—and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic
thee and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure of
their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold
dashes of character, not unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And
when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a
ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the
remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think
untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature's sweet or savage impressions fresh from
her own virgin voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from
accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language—that man makes one in a
whole nation's census—a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all
detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what
seems a half wilful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically great
are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness
is but disease. But, as yet we have not to do with such an one, but with quite another; and still a
man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only results again from another phase of the Quaker, modified by
individual circumstances.
Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman. But unlike Captain
Peleg—who cared not a rush for what are called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-
same serious things the veriest of all trifles—Captain Bildad had not only been originally educated
according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the
sight of many unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn—all that had not moved this native
born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his vest. Still, for all this
immutableness, was there some lack of common consistency about worthy Captain Peleg.
Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had
illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he
in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative
evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know;
but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage
and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another.
This world pays dividends. Rising from a little cabin-boy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a
harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and
captain, and finally a ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous career
by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to
the quiet receiving of his well-earned income.
Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an incorrigible old hunks, and in his
sea-going days, a bitter, hard task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a
curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew, upon arriving home, were
mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially
for a Quaker, he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to swear,
though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard
work out of them. When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking at
you, made you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch something—a hammer or a marling-
spike, and go to work like mad, at something or other, never mind what. Indolence and idleness
perished before him. His own person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his
long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft,
economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat.
Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I followed Captain Peleg
down into the cabin. The space between the decks was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old
Bildad, who always sat so, and never leaned, and this to save his coat tails. His broad-brim was
placed beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his drab vesture was buttoned up to his chin; and
spectacles on nose, he seemed absorbed in reading from a ponderous volume.
"Bildad," cried Captain Peleg, "at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been studying those Scriptures,
now, for the last thirty years, to my certain knowledge. How far ye got, Bildad?"
As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate, Bildad, without noticing his
present irreverence, quietly looked up, and seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg.
"He says he's our man, Bildad," said Peleg, "he wants to ship."
"Dost thee?" said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me.
"I dost," said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.
"What do ye think of him, Bildad?" said Peleg.
"He'll do," said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at his book in a mumbling
tone quite audible.
I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as Peleg, his friend and old
shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I said nothing, only looking round me sharply. Peleg now
threw open a chest, and drawing forth the ship's articles, placed pen and ink before him, and
seated himself at a little table. I began to think it was high time to settle with myself at what terms I
would be willing to engage for the voyage. I was already aware that in the whaling business they
paid no wages; but all hands, including the captain, received certain shares of the profits called
lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining to the
respective duties of the ship's company. I was also aware that being a green hand at whaling, my
own lay would not be very large; but considering that I was used to the sea, could steer a ship,
splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that from all I had heard I should be offered at least the
275th lay—that is, the 275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever that might
eventually amount to. And though the 275th lay was what they call a rather LONG LAY, yet it was
better than nothing; and if we had a lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I would
wear out on it, not to speak of my three years' beef and board, for which I would not have to pay
one stiver.
It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely fortune—and so it was, a
very poor way indeed. But I am one of those that never take on about princely fortunes, and am
quite content if the world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am putting up at this grim sign of
the Thunder Cloud. Upon the whole, I thought that the 275th lay would be about the fair thing, but
would not have been surprised had I been offered the 200th, considering I was of a broad-
shouldered make.
But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about receiving a generous share of
the profits was this: Ashore, I had heard something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable
old crony Bildad; how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod, therefore the other
and more inconsiderable and scattered owners, left nearly the whole management of the ship's
affairs to these two. And I did not know but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty deal to
say about shipping hands, especially as I now found him on board the Pequod, quite at home there
in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his own fireside. Now while Peleg was vainly trying to
mend a pen with his jack-knife, old Bildad, to my no small surprise, considering that he was such
an interested party in these proceedings; Bildad never heeded us, but went on mumbling to
himself out of his book, "LAY not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth—"
"Well, Captain Bildad," interrupted Peleg, "what d'ye say, what lay shall we give this young man?
"
"Thou knowest best," was the sepulchral reply, "the seven hundred and seventy-seventh wouldn't
be too much, would it?—'where moth and rust do corrupt, but LAY—'"
LAY, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and seventy-seventh! Well, old Bildad,
you are determined that I, for one, shall not LAY up many LAYS here below, where moth and rust do
corrupt. It was an exceedingly LONG LAY that, indeed; and though from the magnitude of the figure
it might at first deceive a landsman, yet the slightest consideration will show that though seven
hundred and seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a TEENTH of it,
you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good
deal less than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons; and so I thought at the time.
"Why, blast your eyes, Bildad," cried Peleg, "thou dost not want to swindle this young man! he
must have more than that."
"Seven hundred and seventy-seventh," again said Bildad, without lifting his eyes; and then went
on mumbling—"for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
"I am going to put him down for the three hundredth," said Peleg, "do ye hear that, Bildad! The
three hundredth lay, I say."
Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said, "Captain Peleg, thou hast a
generous heart; but thou must consider the duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship
—widows and orphans, many of them—and that if we too abundantly reward the labors of this
young man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those orphans. The seven
hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg."
"Thou Bildad!" roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the cabin. "Blast ye, Captain
Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug
about that would be heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed round Cape Horn."
"Captain Peleg," said Bildad steadily, "thy conscience may be drawing ten inches of water, or
ten fathoms, I can't tell; but as thou art still an impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy
conscience be but a leaky one; and will in the end sink thee foundering down to the fiery pit,
Captain Peleg."
"Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, ye insult me. It's an all-fired
outrage to tell any human creature that he's bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again
to me, and start my soul-bolts, but I'll—I'll—yes, I'll swallow a live goat with all his hair and horns on.
Out of the cabin, ye canting, drab-coloured son of a wooden gun—a straight wake with ye!"
As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a marvellous oblique, sliding celerity,
Bildad for that time eluded him.
Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and responsible owners of the ship,
and feeling half a mind to give up all idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and
temporarily commanded, I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad, who, I made no
doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before the awakened wrath of Peleg. But to my
astonishment, he sat down again on the transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest
intention of withdrawing. He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg and his ways. As for Peleg,
after letting off his rage as he had, there seemed no more left in him, and he, too, sat down like a
lamb, though he twitched a little as if still nervously agitated. "Whew!" he whistled at last—"the
squall's gone off to leeward, I think. Bildad, thou used to be good at sharpening a lance, mend that
pen, will ye. My jack-knife here needs the grindstone. That's he; thank ye, Bildad. Now then, my
young man, Ishmael's thy name, didn't ye say? Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael, for the three
hundredth lay."
"Captain Peleg," said I, "I have a friend with me who wants to ship too—shall I bring him down
to-morrow?"
"To be sure," said Peleg. "Fetch him along, and we'll look at him."
"What lay does he want?" groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book in which he had again
been burying himself.
"Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad," said Peleg. "Has he ever whaled it any?" turning to
me.
"Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg."
"Well, bring him along then."
And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that I had done a good morning's
work, and that the Pequod was the identical ship that Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and
me round the Cape.
But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the Captain with whom I was to sail
yet remained unseen by me; though, indeed, in many cases, a whale-ship will be completely fitted
out, and receive all her crew on board, ere the captain makes himself visible by arriving to take
command; for sometimes these voyages are so prolonged, and the shore intervals at home so
exceedingly brief, that if the captain have a family, or any absorbing concernment of that sort, he
does not trouble himself much about his ship in port, but leaves her to the owners till all is ready for
sea. However, it is always as well to have a look at him before irrevocably committing yourself into
his hands. Turning back I accosted Captain Peleg, inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.
"And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It's all right enough; thou art shipped."
"Yes, but I should like to see him."
"But I don't think thou wilt be able to at present. I don't know exactly what's the matter with him;
but he keeps close inside the house; a sort of sick, and yet he don't look so. In fact, he ain't sick;
but no, he isn't well either. Any how, young man, he won't always see me, so I don't suppose he will
thee. He's a queer man, Captain Ahab—so some think—but a good one. Oh, thou'lt like him well
enough; no fear, no fear. He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn't speak much;
but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab's above the
common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders
than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales. His lance! aye, the
keenest and the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain't Captain Bildad; no, and he ain't Captain
Peleg; HE'S AHAB, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!"
"And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?"
"Come hither to me—hither, hither," said Peleg, with a significance in his eye that almost startled
me. "Look ye, lad; never say that on board the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did
not name himself. 'Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died when he
was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at Gayhead, said that the name would
somehow prove prophetic. And, perhaps, other fools like her may tell thee the same. I wish to warn
thee. It's a lie. I know Captain Ahab well; I've sailed with him as mate years ago; I know what he is
—a good man—not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good man—something like me
—only there's a good deal more of him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know
that on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting
pains in his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever
since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's been a kind of moody—desperate
moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and
assure thee, young man, it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So
good-bye to thee—and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked name.
Besides, my boy, he has a wife—not three voyages wedded—a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that;
by that sweet girl that old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in
Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!"
As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been incidentally revealed to me of
Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him. And
somehow, at the time, I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don't know what, unless it was
the cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a strange awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot
at all describe, was not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt it; and it did not disincline
me towards him; though I felt impatience at what seemed like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he
was known to me then. However, my thoughts were at length carried in other directions, so that for
the present dark Ahab slipped my mind.
 CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.
As Queequeg's Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did not choose
to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious
obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a
congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our
earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before
the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet
owned and rented in his name.
I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy
ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy
conceits on these subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most absurd
notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;—but what of that? Queequeg thought he knew what he was
about, I suppose; he seemed to be content; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would
not avail; let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for
we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and rituals must be over, I went up
to his room and knocked at the door; but no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside.
"Queequeg," said I softly through the key-hole:—all silent. "I say, Queequeg! why don't you speak?
It's I—Ishmael." But all remained still as before. I began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such
abundant time; I thought he might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked through the key-hole; but the
door opening into an odd corner of the room, the key-hole prospect was but a crooked and sinister
one. I could only see part of the foot-board of the bed and a line of the wall, but nothing more. I was
surprised to behold resting against the wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg's harpoon, which the
landlady the evening previous had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That's
strange, thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he seldom or never goes
abroad without it, therefore he must be inside here, and no possible mistake.
"Queequeg!—Queequeg!"—all still. Something must have happened. Apoplexy! I tried to burst
open the door; but it stubbornly resisted. Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the
first person I met—the chamber-maid. "La! la!" she cried, "I thought something must be the matter.
I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door was locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and
it's been just so silent ever since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your
baggage in for safe keeping. La! la, ma'am!—Mistress! murder! Mrs. Hussey! apoplexy!"—and
with these cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I following.
Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a vinegar-cruet in the other,
having just broken away from the occupation of attending to the castors, and scolding her little
black boy meantime.
"Wood-house!" cried I, "which way to it? Run for God's sake, and fetch something to pry open
the door—the axe!—the axe! he's had a stroke; depend upon it!"—and so saying I was
unmethodically rushing up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the mustard-
pot and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her countenance.
"What's the matter with you, young man?"
"Get the axe! For God's sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry it open!"
"Look here," said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet, so as to have one hand
free; "look here; are you talking about prying open any of my doors?"—and with that she seized my
arm. "What's the matter with you? What's the matter with you, shipmate?"
In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand the whole case.
Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to one side of her nose, she ruminated for an instant;
then exclaimed—"No! I haven't seen it since I put it there." Running to a little closet under the
landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that Queequeg's harpoon was missing.
"He's killed himself," she cried. "It's unfort'nate Stiggs done over again there goes another
counterpane—God pity his poor mother!—it will be the ruin of my house. Has the poor lad a sister?
Where's that girl?—there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint me a sign,
with—"no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;"—might as well kill both birds at
once. Kill? The Lord be merciful to his ghost! What's that noise there? You, young man, avast
there!"
And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force open the door.
"I don't allow it; I won't have my premises spoiled. Go for the locksmith, there's one about a mile
from here. But avast!" putting her hand in her side-pocket, "here's a key that'll fit, I guess; let's see."
And with that, she turned it in the lock; but, alas! Queequeg's supplemental bolt remained
unwithdrawn within.
"Have to burst it open," said I, and was running down the entry a little, for a good start, when the
landlady caught at me, again vowing I should not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and
with a sudden bodily rush dashed myself full against the mark.
With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming against the wall, sent the
plaster to the ceiling; and there, good heavens! there sat Queequeg, altogether cool and self-
collected; right in the middle of the room; squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on top of his
head. He looked neither one way nor the other way, but sat like a carved image with scarce a sign
of active life.
"Queequeg," said I, going up to him, "Queequeg, what's the matter with you?"
"He hain't been a sittin' so all day, has he?" said the landlady.
But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt like pushing him over, so as to
change his position, for it was almost intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally
constrained; especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for upwards of eight or ten
hours, going too without his regular meals.
"Mrs. Hussey," said I, "he's ALIVE at all events; so leave us, if you please, and I will see to this
strange affair myself."
Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail upon Queequeg to take a chair; but
in vain. There he sat; and all he could do—for all my polite arts and blandishments—he would not
move a peg, nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor notice my presence in the slightest
way.
I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do they fast on their hams that
way in his native island. It must be so; yes, it's part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him rest;
he'll get up sooner or later, no doubt. It can't last for ever, thank God, and his Ramadan only comes
once a year; and I don't believe it's very punctual then.
I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the long stories of some sailors who
had just come from a plum-pudding voyage, as they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in a
schooner or brig, confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean only); after listening to these
plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o'clock, I went up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this
time Queequeg must certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no; there he was
just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began to grow vexed with him; it seemed so
downright senseless and insane to be sitting there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold
room, holding a piece of wood on his head.
"For heaven's sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and have some supper. You'll
starve; you'll kill yourself, Queequeg." But not a word did he reply.
Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep; and no doubt, before a
great while, he would follow me. But previous to turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and
threw it over him, as it promised to be a very cold night; and he had nothing but his ordinary round
jacket on. For some time, do all I would, I could not get into the faintest doze. I had blown out the
candle; and the mere thought of Queequeg—not four feet off—sitting there in that uneasy position,
stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really wretched. Think of it; sleeping all night in the
same room with a wide awake pagan on his hams in this dreary, unaccountable Ramadan!
But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break of day; when, looking over
the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as if he had been screwed down to the floor. But as soon
as the first glimpse of sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating joints, but with a
cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay; pressed his forehead again against mine; and said
his Ramadan was over.
Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it may, so long as
that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don't believe it also.
But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine,
makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that
individual aside and argue the point with him.
And just so I now did with Queequeg. "Queequeg," said I, "get into bed now, and lie and listen to
me." I then went on, beginning with the rise and progress of the primitive religions, and coming
down to the various religions of the present time, during which time I labored to show Queequeg
that all these Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were
stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless for the soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious laws of
Hygiene and common sense. I told him, too, that he being in other things such an extremely
sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained me, to see him now so
deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body
cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved.
This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their
hereafters. In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an
undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias
nurtured by Ramadans.
I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with dyspepsia; expressing the
idea very plainly, so that he could take it in. He said no; only upon one memorable occasion. It was
after a great feast given by his father the king, on the gaining of a great battle wherein fifty of the
enemy had been killed by about two o'clock in the afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very
evening.
"No more, Queequeg," said I, shuddering; "that will do;" for I knew the inferences without his
further hinting them. I had seen a sailor who had visited that very island, and he told me that it was
the custom, when a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain in the yard or
garden of the victor; and then, one by one, they were placed in great wooden trenchers, and
garnished round like a pilau, with breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths,
were sent round with the victor's compliments to all his friends, just as though these presents were
so many Christmas turkeys.
After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much impression upon Queequeg.
Because, in the first place, he somehow seemed dull of hearing on that important subject, unless
considered from his own point of view; and, in the second place, he did not more than one third
understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and, finally, he no doubt thought he knew a good
deal more about the true religion than I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending concern
and compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible young man should be so
hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.
At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty breakfast of chowders
of all sorts, so that the landlady should not make much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied
out to board the Pequod, sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones.
 CHAPTER 18. His Mark.
As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg carrying his
harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us from his wigwam, saying he had not
suspected my friend was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board
that craft, unless they previously produced their papers.
"What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?" said I, now jumping on the bulwarks, and leaving
my comrade standing on the wharf.
"I mean," he replied, "he must show his papers."
"Yes," said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from behind Peleg's, out of the
wigwam. "He must show that he's converted. Son of darkness," he added, turning to Queequeg,
"art thou at present in communion with any Christian church?"
"Why," said I, "he's a member of the first Congregational Church." Here be it said, that many
tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket ships at last come to be converted into the churches.
"First Congregational Church," cried Bildad, "what! that worships in Deacon Deuteronomy
Coleman's meeting-house?" and so saying, taking out his spectacles, he rubbed them with his
great yellow bandana handkerchief, and putting them on very carefully, came out of the wigwam,
and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks, took a good long look at Queequeg.
"How long hath he been a member?" he then said, turning to me; "not very long, I rather guess,
young man."
"No," said Peleg, "and he hasn't been baptized right either, or it would have washed some of
that devil's blue off his face."
"Do tell, now," cried Bildad, "is this Philistine a regular member of Deacon Deuteronomy's
meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it every Lord's day."
"I don't know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting," said I; "all I know is, that
Queequeg here is a born member of the First Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself,
Queequeg is."
"Young man," said Bildad sternly, "thou art skylarking with me—explain thyself, thou young Hittite.
What church dost thee mean? answer me."
Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied. "I mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church to
which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother's
son and soul of us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping
world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some queer crotchets no ways touching the
grand belief; in THAT we all join hands."
"Splice, thou mean'st SPLICE hands," cried Peleg, drawing nearer. "Young man, you'd better
ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast hand; I never heard a better sermon. Deacon
Deuteronomy—why Father Mapple himself couldn't beat it, and he's reckoned something. Come
aboard, come aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, tell Quohog there—what's that you call
him? tell Quohog to step along. By the great anchor, what a harpoon he's got there! looks like good
stuff that; and he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand
in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?"
Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the bulwarks, from
thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee,
and poising his harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:—
"Cap'ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well, spose him one whale
eye, well, den!" and taking sharp aim at it, he darted the iron right over old Bildad's broad brim,
clean across the ship's decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.
"Now," said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, "spos-ee him whale-e eye; why, dad whale
dead."
"Quick, Bildad," said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close vicinity of the flying harpoon,
had retreated towards the cabin gangway. "Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers. We
must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we'll give ye
the ninetieth lay, and that's more than ever was given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket."
So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon enrolled among the
same ship's company to which I myself belonged.
When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for signing, he turned to
me and said, "I guess, Quohog there don't know how to write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye!
dost thou sign thy name or make thy mark?"
But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken part in similar ceremonies,
looked no ways abashed; but taking the offered pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place,
an exact counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so that through
Captain Peleg's obstinate mistake touching his appellative, it stood something like this:—
Quohog. his X mark.
Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg, and at last rising
solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets of his broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of
tracts, and selecting one entitled "The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose," placed it in
Queequeg's hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his, looked earnestly into his
eyes, and said, "Son of darkness, I must do my duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel
concerned for the souls of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I sadly fear, I
beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn the idol Bell, and the hideous dragon;
turn from the wrath to come; mind thine eye, I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery
pit!"
Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad's language, heterogeneously mixed with
Scriptural and domestic phrases.
"Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpooneer," Peleg. "Pious
harpooneers never make good voyagers—it takes the shark out of 'em; no harpooneer is worth a
straw who aint pretty sharkish. There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out of
all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to good. He got so
frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from whales, for fear of after-
claps, in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones."
"Peleg! Peleg!" said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, "thou thyself, as I myself, hast seen many
a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what it is to have the fear of death; how, then, can'st thou
prate in this ungodly guise. Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this same Pequod
here had her three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when thou went
mate with Captain Ahab, did'st thou not think of Death and the Judgment then?"
"Hear him, hear him now," cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and thrusting his hands far
down into his pockets,—"hear him, all of ye. Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship
would sink! Death and the Judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an everlasting
thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us, fore and aft. Think of Death and the
Judgment then? No! no time to think about Death then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was
thinking of; and how to save all hands—how to rig jury-masts—how to get into the nearest port; that
was what I was thinking of."
Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck, where we followed him. There
he stood, very quietly overlooking some sailmakers who were mending a top-sail in the waist. Now
and then he stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which otherwise might
have been wasted.
 CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.
"Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?"
Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from the water, for the
moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the above words were put to us by a stranger,
who, pausing before us, levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but
shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a black handkerchief investing
his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all directions flowed over his face, and left it like the
complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up.
"Have ye shipped in her?" he repeated.
"You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose," said I, trying to gain a little more time for an
uninterrupted look at him.
"Aye, the Pequod—that ship there," he said, drawing back his whole arm, and then rapidly
shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.
"Yes," said I, "we have just signed the articles."
"Anything down there about your souls?"
"About what?"
"Oh, perhaps you hav'n't got any," he said quickly. "No matter though, I know many chaps that
hav'n't got any,—good luck to 'em; and they are all the better off for it. A soul's a sort of a fifth wheel
to a wagon."
"What are you jabbering about, shipmate?" said I.
"HE'S got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in other chaps," abruptly
said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis upon the word HE.
"Queequeg," said I, "let's go; this fellow has broken loose from somewhere; he's talking about
something and somebody we don't know."
"Stop!" cried the stranger. "Ye said true—ye hav'n't seen Old Thunder yet, have ye?"
"Who's Old Thunder?" said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness of his manner.
"Captain Ahab."
"What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?"
"Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye hav'n't seen him yet, have
ye?"
"No, we hav'n't. He's sick they say, but is getting better, and will be all right again before long."
"All right again before long!" laughed the stranger, with a solemnly derisive sort of laugh. "Look
ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then this left arm of mine will be all right; not before."
"What do you know about him?"
"What did they TELL you about him? Say that!"
"They didn't tell much of anything about him; only I've heard that he's a good whale-hunter, and a
good captain to his crew."
"That's true, that's true—yes, both true enough. But you must jump when he gives an order. Step
and growl; growl and go—that's the word with Captain Ahab. But nothing about that thing that
happened to him off Cape Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights; nothing
about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in Santa?—heard nothing about
that, eh? Nothing about the silver calabash he spat into? And nothing about his losing his leg last
voyage, according to the prophecy. Didn't ye hear a word about them matters and something
more, eh? No, I don't think ye did; how could ye? Who knows it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But
hows'ever, mayhap, ye've heard tell about the leg, and how he lost it; aye, ye have heard of that, I
dare say. Oh yes, THAT every one knows a'most—I mean they know he's only one leg; and that a
parmacetti took the other off."
"My friend," said I, "what all this gibberish of yours is about, I don't know, and I don't much care;
for it seems to me that you must be a little damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of
Captain Ahab, of that ship there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all about the loss of
his leg."
"ALL about it, eh—sure you do?—all?"
"Pretty sure."
With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like stranger stood a moment, as
if in a troubled reverie; then starting a little, turned and said:—"Ye've shipped, have ye? Names
down on the papers? Well, well, what's signed, is signed; and what's to be, will be; and then again,
perhaps it won't be, after all. Anyhow, it's all fixed and arranged a'ready; and some sailors or other
must go with him, I suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity 'em! Morning to ye,
shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I'm sorry I stopped ye."
"Look here, friend," said I, "if you have anything important to tell us, out with it; but if you are only
trying to bamboozle us, you are mistaken in your game; that's all I have to say."
"And it's said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way; you are just the man for him
—the likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates, morning! Oh! when ye get there, tell 'em I've concluded
not to make one of 'em."
"Ah, my dear fellow, you can't fool us that way—you can't fool us. It is the easiest thing in the
world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him."
"Morning to ye, shipmates, morning."
"Morning it is," said I. "Come along, Queequeg, let's leave this crazy man. But stop, tell me your
name, will you?"
"Elijah."
Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each other's fashion, upon this
ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we
had not gone perhaps above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and looking back
as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us, though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of
him struck me so, that I said nothing to Queequeg of his being behind, but passed on with my
comrade, anxious to see whether the stranger would turn the same corner that we did. He did; and
then it seemed to me that he was dogging us, but with what intent I could not for the life of me
imagine. This circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous, half-hinting, half-revealing, shrouded sort
of talk, now begat in me all kinds of vague wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all
connected with the Pequod; and Captain Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn fit; and
the silver calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when I left the ship the day previous;
and the prediction of the squaw Tistig; and the voyage we had bound ourselves to sail; and a
hundred other shadowy things.
I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really dogging us or not, and with
that intent crossed the way with Queequeg, and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah
passed on, without seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more, and finally as it
seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug.
 CHAPTER 20. All Astir.
A day or two passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod. Not only were the old
sails being mended, but new sails were coming on board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of
rigging; in short, everything betokened that the ship's preparations were hurrying to a close.
Captain Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam keeping a sharp look-out upon
the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing and providing at the stores; and the men employed in the
hold and on the rigging were working till long after night-fall.
On the day following Queequeg's signing the articles, word was given at all the inns where the
ship's company were stopping, that their chests must be on board before night, for there was no
telling how soon the vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our traps, resolving,
however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it seems they always give very long notice in these cases,
and the ship did not sail for several days. But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and
there is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod was fully equipped.
Every one knows what a multitude of things—beds, sauce-pans, knives and forks, shovels and
tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are indispensable to the business of housekeeping.
Just so with whaling, which necessitates a three-years' housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far
from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And though this also holds true of
merchant vessels, yet not by any means to the same extent as with whalemen. For besides the
great length of the whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the fishery,
and the impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors usually frequented, it must be
remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds, and
especially to the destruction and loss of the very things upon which the success of the voyage most
depends. Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare
everythings, almost, but a spare Captain and duplicate ship.
At the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of the Pequod had been almost
completed; comprising her beef, bread, water, fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, as before
hinted, for some time there was a continual fetching and carrying on board of divers odds and
ends of things, both large and small.
Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain Bildad's sister, a lean old
lady of a most determined and indefatigable spirit, but withal very kindhearted, who seemed
resolved that, if SHE could help it, nothing should be found wanting in the Pequod, after once fairly
getting to sea. At one time she would come on board with a jar of pickles for the steward's pantry;
another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate's desk, where he kept his log; a third time with
a roll of flannel for the small of some one's rheumatic back. Never did any woman better deserve
her name, which was Charity—Aunt Charity, as everybody called her. And like a sister of charity
did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither, ready to turn her hand and heart to
anything that promised to yield safety, comfort, and consolation to all on board a ship in which her
beloved brother Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of well-
saved dollars.
But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on board, as she did the last
day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and a still longer whaling lance in the other. Nor was Bildad
himself nor Captain Peleg at all backward. As for Bildad, he carried about with him a long list of
the articles needed, and at every fresh arrival, down went his mark opposite that article upon the
paper. Every once in a while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring at the men
down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head, and then concluded by roaring
back into his wigwam.
During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the craft, and as often I asked
about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when he was going to come on board his ship. To these
questions they would answer, that he was getting better and better, and was expected aboard
every day; meantime, the two captains, Peleg and Bildad, could attend to everything necessary to
fit the vessel for the voyage. If I had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen very
plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without
once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship
sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if
he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from
himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.
At last it was given out that some time next day the ship would certainly sail. So next morning,
Queequeg and I took a very early start.
 CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.
It was nearly six o'clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we drew nigh the wharf.
"There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right," said I to Queequeg, "it can't be
shadows; she's off by sunrise, I guess; come on!"
"Avast!" cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close behind us, laid a hand upon
both our shoulders, and then insinuating himself between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the
uncertain twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.
"Going aboard?"
"Hands off, will you," said I.
"Lookee here," said Queequeg, shaking himself, "go 'way!"
"Ain't going aboard, then?"
"Yes, we are," said I, "but what business is that of yours? Do you know, Mr. Elijah, that I consider
you a little impertinent?"
"No, no, no; I wasn't aware of that," said Elijah, slowly and wonderingly looking from me to
Queequeg, with the most unaccountable glances.
"Elijah," said I, "you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We are going to the Indian and
Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not to be detained."
"Ye be, be ye? Coming back afore breakfast?"
"He's cracked, Queequeg," said I, "come on."
"Holloa!" cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few paces.
"Never mind him," said I, "Queequeg, come on."
But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my shoulder, said—"Did ye see
anything looking like men going towards that ship a while ago?"
Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, "Yes, I thought I did see four or
five men; but it was too dim to be sure."
"Very dim, very dim," said Elijah. "Morning to ye."
Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and touching my shoulder
again, said, "See if you can find 'em now, will ye?
"Find who?"
"Morning to ye! morning to ye!" he rejoined, again moving off. "Oh! I was going to warn ye
against—but never mind, never mind—it's all one, all in the family too;—sharp frost this morning,
ain't it? Good-bye to ye. Shan't see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it's before the Grand Jury."
And with these cracked words he finally departed, leaving me, for the moment, in no small
wonderment at his frantic impudence.
At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in profound quiet, not a soul moving.
The cabin entrance was locked within; the hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging.
Going forward to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open. Seeing a light, we went
down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole
length upon two chests, his face downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profoundest
slumber slept upon him.
 "Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?" said I, looking dubiously at
the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the wharf, Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now
alluded to; hence I would have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that matter, were it
not for Elijah's otherwise inexplicable question. But I beat the thing down; and again marking the
sleeper, jocularly hinted to Queequeg that perhaps we had best sit up with the body; telling him to
establish himself accordingly. He put his hand upon the sleeper's rear, as though feeling if it was
soft enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly down there.
"Gracious! Queequeg, don't sit there," said I.
"Oh! perry dood seat," said Queequeg, "my country way; won't hurt him face."
"Face!" said I, "call that his face? very benevolent countenance then; but how hard he breathes,
he's heaving himself; get off, Queequeg, you are heavy, it's grinding the face of the poor. Get off,
Queequeg! Look, he'll twitch you off soon. I wonder he don't wake."
Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and lighted his tomahawk
pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe passing over the sleeper, from one to the other. Meanwhile,
upon questioning him in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his land,
owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king, chiefs, and great people generally,
were in the custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house
comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them round in
the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very convenient on an excursion; much better than those
garden-chairs which are convertible into walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his
attendant, and desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps in some
damp marshy place.
While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk from me, he
flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper's head.
"What's that for, Queequeg?"
"Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!"
He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe, which, it seemed,
had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed his soul, when we were directly attracted to
the sleeping rigger. The strong vapour now completely filling the contracted hole, it began to tell
upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed troubled in the nose; then revolved
over once or twice; then sat up and rubbed his eyes.
"Holloa!" he breathed at last, "who be ye smokers?"
"Shipped men," answered I, "when does she sail?"
"Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The Captain came aboard last night."
"What Captain?—Ahab?"
"Who but him indeed?"
I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we heard a noise on
deck.
"Holloa! Starbuck's astir," said the rigger. "He's a lively chief mate, that; good man, and a pious;
but all alive now, I must turn to." And so saying he went on deck, and we followed.
It was now clear sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and threes; the riggers bestirred
themselves; the mates were actively engaged; and several of the shore people were busy in
bringing various last things on board. Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained invisibly enshrined within
his cabin.
 CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.
At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship's riggers, and after the Pequod had
been hauled out from the wharf, and after the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat,
with her last gift—a night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her brother-in-law, and a spare Bible for
the steward—after all this, the two Captains, Peleg and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning
to the chief mate, Peleg said:
"Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain Ahab is all ready—just spoke to
him—nothing more to be got from shore, eh? Well, call all hands, then. Muster 'em aft here—blast
'em!"
"No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg," said Bildad, "but away with thee,
friend Starbuck, and do our bidding."
How now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage, Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad
were going it with a high hand on the quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at
sea, as well as to all appearances in port. And, as for Captain Ahab, no sign of him was yet to be
seen; only, they said he was in the cabin. But then, the idea was, that his presence was by no
means necessary in getting the ship under weigh, and steering her well out to sea. Indeed, as that
was not at all his proper business, but the pilot's; and as he was not yet completely recovered—so
they said—therefore, Captain Ahab stayed below. And all this seemed natural enough; especially
as in the merchant service many captains never show themselves on deck for a considerable time
after heaving up the anchor, but remain over the cabin table, having a farewell merry-making with
their shore friends, before they quit the ship for good with the pilot.
But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg was now all alive. He
seemed to do most of the talking and commanding, and not Bildad.
"Aft here, ye sons of bachelors," he cried, as the sailors lingered at the main-mast. "Mr.
Starbuck, drive'em aft."
"Strike the tent there!"—was the next order. As I hinted before, this whalebone marquee was
never pitched except in port; and on board the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent
was well known to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.
"Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!—jump!"—was the next command, and the crew sprang
for the handspikes.
Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the pilot is the forward part of the
ship. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it known, in addition to his other officers, was one of the
licensed pilots of the port—he being suspected to have got himself made a pilot in order to save
the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was concerned in, for he never piloted any other craft
—Bildad, I say, might now be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching
anchor, and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody, to cheer the hands at
the windlass, who roared forth some sort of a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley, with hearty
good will. Nevertheless, not three days previous, Bildad had told them that no profane songs would
be allowed on board the Pequod, particularly in getting under weigh; and Charity, his sister, had
placed a small choice copy of Watts in each seaman's berth.
Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped and swore astern in the
most frightful manner. I almost thought he would sink the ship before the anchor could be got up;
involuntarily I paused on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the perils
we both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a pilot. I was comforting myself, however,
with the thought that in pious Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and
seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear, and turning round, was horrified at
the apparition of Captain Peleg in the act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. That
was my first kick.
"Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?" he roared. "Spring, thou sheep-head;
spring, and break thy backbone! Why don't ye spring, I say, all of ye—spring! Quohog! spring, thou
chap with the red whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green pants. Spring, I say, all of
ye, and spring your eyes out!" And so saying, he moved along the windlass, here and there using
his leg very freely, while imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks I, Captain
Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.
At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas;
and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry
ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the
bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast
curving icicles depended from the bows.
Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old craft deep dived into
the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage
rang, his steady notes were heard,—
"Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, Stand dressed in living green. So to the Jews old
Canaan stood, While Jordan rolled between."
Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They were full of hope and
fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter
jacket, there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads and
glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at
midsummer.
At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed no longer. The stout sail-boat
that had accompanied us began ranging alongside.
It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at this juncture,
especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet; very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so
long and perilous a voyage—beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of his
hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate sailed as captain; a man
almost as old as he, once more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say
good-bye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him,—poor old Bildad lingered long;
paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the cabin to speak another farewell word there;
again came on deck, and looked to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only
bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards the land; looked aloft; looked
right and left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin,
convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing
heroically in his face, as much as to say, "Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can."
As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all his philosophy, there was a
tear twinkling in his eye, when the lantern came too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin
to deck—now a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate.
But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about him,—"Captain Bildad
—come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the main-yard there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close
alongside, now! Careful, careful!—come, Bildad, boy—say your last. Luck to ye, Starbuck—luck to
ye, Mr. Stubb—luck to ye, Mr. Flask—good-bye and good luck to ye all—and this day three years
I'll have a hot supper smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away!"
"God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men," murmured old Bildad, almost
incoherently. "I hope ye'll have fine weather now, so that Captain Ahab may soon be moving among
ye—a pleasant sun is all he needs, and ye'll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go. Be
careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don't stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooneers; good white cedar
plank is raised full three per cent. within the year. Don't forget your prayers, either. Mr. Starbuck,
mind that cooper don't waste the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in the green locker! Don't
whale it too much a' Lord's days, men; but don't miss a fair chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's
good gifts. Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch
at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. Good-bye, good-bye! Don't keep that cheese too
long down in the hold, Mr. Starbuck; it'll spoil. Be careful with the butter—twenty cents the pound it
was, and mind ye, if—"
"Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,—away!" and with that, Peleg hurried him over
the side, and both dropt into the boat.
Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew
overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like
fate into the lone Atlantic.
 CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in
New Bedford at the inn.
When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold
malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic
awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years' dangerous
voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed
scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no
epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared
with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port
would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm
blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's
direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would
make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing,
fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's
landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all
deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her
sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish
shore?
But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it
to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!
For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so
vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy
ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
 CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling; and as this business of
whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and
disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby
done to us hunters of whales.
In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish the fact, that among people
at large, the business of whaling is not accounted on a level with what are called the liberal
professions. If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society, it would but
slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were he presented to the company as a
harpooneer, say; and if in emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials S.W.F.
(Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed pre-eminently
presuming and ridiculous.
Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honouring us whalemen, is this: they think
that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively
engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true.
But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all Martial Commanders whom
the world invariably delights to honour. And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our
business, ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and which,
upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at least among the cleanliest things of
this tidy earth. But even granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks
of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so
many soldiers return to drink in all ladies' plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the
popular conceit of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely
marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail,
fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man
compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!
But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the profoundest
homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn
round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!
But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales; see what we whalemen are,
and have been.
Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of
France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that
town some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the
years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of L1,000,000? And lastly, how
comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the
world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly
consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every
year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if there
be not something puissant in whaling?
But this is not the half; look again.
I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single peaceful
influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad
world, taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way and another,
it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so continuously momentous in their
sequential issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring
themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to catalogue all these
things. Let a handful suffice. For many years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting
out the remotest and least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes
which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If American and European men-
of-war now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to the honour and glory of
the whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted between them and the
savages. They may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your
Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were
as great, and greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern. For in their succourless empty-
handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin
islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and muskets would
not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old South Sea Voyages, those
things were but the life-time commonplaces of our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which
Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the
ship's common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world!
Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely any intercourse
but colonial, was carried on between Europe and the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on
the Pacific coast. It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous policy of the Spanish
crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from
those whalemen at last eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old
Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.
That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the enlightened world
by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned
those shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship is the
true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the
emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship
luckily dropping an anchor in their waters. The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same
truth, and do commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the missionary and
the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive missionaries to their first destinations. If that
double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the
credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold.
But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has no aesthetically noble associations
connected with it, then am I ready to shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a split
helmet every time.
The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say.
THE WHALE NO FAMOUS AUTHOR, AND WHALING NO FAMOUS CHRONICLER? Who
wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed the first
narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own
royal pen, took down the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who
pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!
True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no good blood in their
veins.
NO GOOD BLOOD IN THEIR VEINS? They have something better than royal blood there. The
grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel; afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of
the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and harpooneers—all
kith and kin to noble Benjamin—this day darting the barbed iron from one side of the world to the
other.
Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.
WHALING NOT RESPECTABLE? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory law, the whale is
declared "a royal fish."*
Oh, that's only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand imposing way.
THE WHALE NEVER FIGURED IN ANY GRAND IMPOSING WAY? In one of the mighty
triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the world's capital, the bones of a whale,
brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed
procession.*
*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real dignity in whaling.
NO DIGNITY IN WHALING? The dignity of our calling the very heavens attest. Cetus is a
constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to
Queequeg! No more! I know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty whales. I
account that man more honourable than that great captain of antiquity who boasted of taking as
many walled towns.
And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall
ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably
ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done
than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any
precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling;
for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
 CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but substantiated facts. But after
embattling his facts, an advocate who should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which
might tell eloquently upon his cause—such an advocate, would he not be blameworthy?
It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious
process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so
called, and there may be a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely—who knows? Certain I
am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it
be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery?
Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in
common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably
smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has
probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his
totality.
But the only thing to be considered here, is this—what kind of oil is used at coronations?
Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-
liver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the
sweetest of all oils?
Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!
 CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.
The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent.
He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot
latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood
would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and
famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid
summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his
thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed
the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means
ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it,
and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed
prepared to endure for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or
torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all climates.
Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold
perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part
was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety
and fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in some cases
seemed well nigh to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and
endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly
incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems
rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents and inward
presentiments were his. And if at times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more
did his far-away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more
from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those latent influences
which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by
others in the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. "I will have no man in my boat," said
Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale." By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most
reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril,
but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
"Aye, aye," said Stubb, the second mate, "Starbuck, there, is as careful a man as you'll find
anywhere in this fishery." But we shall ere long see what that word "careful" precisely means when
used by a man like Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter.
Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply
useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought,
perhaps, that in this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of the ship,
like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering
for whales after sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting
him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be
killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew. What
doom was his own father's? Where, in the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn limbs of his
brother?
With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain superstitiousness, as has
been said; the courage of this Starbuck which could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have
been extreme. But it was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such terrible
experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature that these things should fail in
latently engendering an element in him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from
its confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery
chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or
winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those
more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating
brow of an enraged and mighty man.
 But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete abasement of poor
Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay
shocking, to expose the fall of valour in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint stock-
companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and
meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing
creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest
robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact
though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle
of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her
upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings
and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in
the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates
without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all
democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high
qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the
most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that
workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun;
then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou Just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one
royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst
not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly
hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst
pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder
him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest
champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!
 CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.
Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according to local
usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as
they came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the chase,
toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged for the year. Good-humored,
easy, and careless, he presided over his whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a
dinner, and his crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable arrangement of
his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box. When close to the
whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as
a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with
the most exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an
easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all,
might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner,
no doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir
themselves there, about something which he would find out when he obeyed the order, and not
sooner.
What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going, unfearing man, so cheerily
trudging off with the burden of life in a world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their
packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that thing must have
been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his
face. You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his nose as
without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy
reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one
from the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be in readiness anew. For,
when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his
mouth.
I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his peculiar disposition; for
every one knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless
miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the cholera, some
people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal
tribulations, Stubb's tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.
The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard. A short, stout, ruddy young
fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales, who somehow seemed to think that the great
leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of
honour with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost was he to all sense of
reverence for the many marvels of their majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything
like an apprehension of any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the
wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring only a little
circumvention and some small application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil. This
ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in the matter of whales; he
followed these fish for the fun of it; and a three years' voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke
that lasted that length of time. As a carpenter's nails are divided into wrought nails and cut nails; so
mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight
and last long. They called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could be
well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in Arctic whalers; and which by the
means of many radiating side timbers inserted into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy
concussions of those battering seas.
Now these three mates—Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous men. They it was who by
universal prescription commanded three of the Pequod's boats as headsmen. In that grand order
of battle in which Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales,
these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with their long keen
whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers; even as the harpooneers were flingers of
javelins.
And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight of old, is always
accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer, who in certain conjunctures provides him with a
fresh lance, when the former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and moreover,
as there generally subsists between the two, a close intimacy and friendliness; it is therefore but
meet, that in this place we set down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what headsman
each of them belonged.
First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected for his squire. But
Queequeg is already known.
Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of
Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant of a village of red men, which has long
supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers. In the
fishery, they usually go by the generic name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego's long, lean, sable hair, his
high cheek bones, and black rounding eyes—for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but
Antarctic in their glittering expression—all this sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the
unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose,
had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main. But no longer snuffing in the trail of
the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea;
the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the tawny
brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of the
earlier Puritans, and half-believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the
Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second mate's squire.
Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black negro-savage, with a lion-like
tread—an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that
the sailors called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them. In his
youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his native
coast. And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan
harbors most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold life of the
fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; Daggoo
retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of
six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white man
standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this
imperial negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man
beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that at the present day not one
in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are
Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American
whale fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering
forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say,
because in all these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world
as generously supplying the muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the
Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews from
the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull
or London, put in at the Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the
passage homewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem
to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, ISOLATOES too, I call
such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each ISOLATO living on a separate
continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An
Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth,
accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar from which not
very many of them ever come back. Black Little Pip—he never did—oh, no! he went before. Poor
Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere long see him, beating his tambourine;
prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in
with angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there!
 CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen of Captain Ahab. The
mates regularly relieved each other at the watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary,
they seemed to be the only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from the cabin
with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was plain they but commanded vicariously.
Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to
penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.
Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly gazed aft to mark if any
strange face were visible; for my first vague disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the
seclusion of the sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened at times by the
ragged Elijah's diabolical incoherences uninvitedly recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not
have before conceived of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was almost
ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish prophet of the wharves. But whatever
it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness—to call it so—which I felt, yet whenever I came to look
about me in the ship, it seemed against all warrantry to cherish such emotions. For though the
harpooneers, with the great body of the crew, were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set
than any of the tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me
acquainted with, still I ascribed this—and rightly ascribed it—to the fierce uniqueness of the very
nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was
especially the aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly
calculated to allay these colourless misgivings, and induce confidence and cheerfulness in every
presentment of the voyage. Three better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own
different way, could not readily be found, and they were every one of them Americans; a
Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot from out her
harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from it to the
southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we sailed, gradually leaving that
merciless winter, and all its intolerable weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still
grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the ship was rushing
through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the
deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail,
foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his
quarter-deck.
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He
looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs
without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His
whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like
Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down
one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender
rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight,
lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a
single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving
the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the
scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout
the voyage little or no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's senior,
an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years
old did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal
fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a
grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out of
Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the
immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with preternatural powers of
discernment. So that no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain
Ahab should be tranquilly laid out—which might hardly come to pass, so he muttered—then,
whoever should do that last office for the dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it,
that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing
to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that this ivory leg
had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw. "Aye, he was
dismasted off Japan," said the old Gay-Head Indian once; "but like his dismasted craft, he
shipped another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of 'em."
I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod's quarter
deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or
so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud;
Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an
infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless,
forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him;
though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful,
consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab
stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of
some mighty woe.
Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But after that morning, he was
every day visible to the crew; either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had;
or heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he
became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the
dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass,
that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at
last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was only
making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision
the mates were fully competent to, so that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or
excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were
piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.
Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather we
came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing
girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most
thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-
hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air.
More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have
soon flowered out in a smile.
 CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the
bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August
of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as
crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and
stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the
memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, 'twas hard
to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that
unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they
turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her
crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these subtle agencies, more and
more they wrought on Ahab's texture.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that
looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to
visit the night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much to live
in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the
planks. "It feels like going down into one's tomb,"—he would mutter to himself—"for an old captain
like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth."
So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were set, and the band on
deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below; and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the
forecastle, the sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt it to its
place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when this sort of steady quietude would
begin to prevail, habitually, the silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old
man would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way. Some considering touch
of humanity was in him; for at times like these, he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-
deck; because to his wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would
have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their dreams would have been on
the crunching teeth of sharks. But once, the mood was on him too deep for common regardings;
and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb,
the old second mate, came up from below, with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness,
hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; but there
might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a
globe of tow, and the insertion into it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then.
"Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb," said Ahab, "that thou wouldst wad me that fashion? But go thy ways;
I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave; where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the
filling one at last.—Down, dog, and kennel!"
Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly scornful old man, Stubb was
speechless a moment; then said excitedly, "I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but
less than half like it, sir."
"Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away, as if to avoid some
passionate temptation.
"No, sir; not yet," said Stubb, emboldened, "I will not tamely be called a dog, sir."
"Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or I'll clear the world of
thee!"
As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in his aspect, that Stubb
involuntarily retreated.
"I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it," muttered Stubb, as he found
himself descending the cabin-scuttle. "It's very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don't well know
whether to go back and strike him, or—what's that?—down here on my knees and pray for him?
Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the first time I ever DID pray. It's queer;
very queer; and he's queer too; aye, take him fore and aft, he's about the queerest old man Stubb
ever sailed with. How he flashed at me!—his eyes like powder-pans! is he mad? Anyway there's
something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks. He aint in
his bed now, either, more than three hours out of the twenty-four; and he don't sleep then. Didn't that
Dough-Boy, the steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man's hammock clothes
all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots,
and the pillow a sort of frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on it? A hot old man! I guess
he's got what some folks ashore call a conscience; it's a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say—worse nor
a toothache. Well, well; I don't know what it is, but the Lord keep me from catching it. He's full of
riddles; I wonder what he goes into the after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he
suspects; what's that for, I should like to know? Who's made appointments with him in the hold?
Ain't that queer, now? But there's no telling, it's the old game—Here goes for a snooze. Damn me,
it's worth a fellow's while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think of
it, that's about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of queer, too. Damn me, but all things are
queer, come to think of 'em. But that's against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh
commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth—So here goes again. But how's that? didn't
he call me a dog? blazes! he called me ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of
THAT! He might as well have kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he DID kick me, and I didn't
observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow, somehow. It flashed like a bleached bone. What
the devil's the matter with me? I don't stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a
sort of turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though—How? how?
how?—but the only way's to stash it; so here goes to hammock again; and in the morning, I'll see
how this plaguey juggling thinks over by daylight."
 CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.
When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks; and then, as had
been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and
also his pipe. Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the weather side of
the deck, he sat and smoked.
In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of
the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without
bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a
great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.
Some moments passed, during which the thick vapour came from his mouth in quick and
constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. "How now," he soliloquized at last, withdrawing
the tube, "this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be
gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring—aye, and ignorantly smoking to
windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my
final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing
that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapours among mild white hairs, not among
torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more—"
He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the same instant the
ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the
planks.
 CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.
Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.
"Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man's ivory leg, well I dreamed
he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right
off! And then, presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking at it. But what
was still more curious, Flask—you know how curious all dreams are—through all this rage that I
was in, I somehow seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an insult, that
kick from Ahab. 'Why,' thinks I, 'what's the row? It's not a real leg, only a false leg.' And there's a
mighty difference between a living thump and a dead thump. That's what makes a blow from the
hand, Flask, fifty times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane. The living member—that
makes the living insult, my little man. And thinks I to myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing
my silly toes against that cursed pyramid—so confoundedly contradictory was it all, all the while, I
say, I was thinking to myself, 'what's his leg now, but a cane—a whalebone cane. Yes,' thinks I, 'it
was only a playful cudgelling—in fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me—not a base kick.
Besides,' thinks I, 'look at it once; why, the end of it—the foot part—what a small sort of end it is;
whereas, if a broad footed farmer kicked me, THERE'S a devilish broad insult. But this insult is
whittled down to a point only.' But now comes the greatest joke of the dream, Flask. While I was
battering away at the pyramid, a sort of badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back, takes
me by the shoulders, and slews me round. 'What are you 'bout?' says he. Slid! man, but I was
frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was over the fright. 'What am I about?' says I
at last. 'And what business is that of yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do YOU want a
kick?' By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned round his stern to me, bent over,
and dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a clout—what do you think, I saw?—why thunder
alive, man, his stern was stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on second thoughts,
'I guess I won't kick you, old fellow.' 'Wise Stubb,' said he, 'wise Stubb;' and kept muttering it all the
time, a sort of eating of his own gums like a chimney hag. Seeing he wasn't going to stop saying
over his 'wise Stubb, wise Stubb,' I thought I might as well fall to kicking the pyramid again. But I
had only just lifted my foot for it, when he roared out, 'Stop that kicking!' 'Halloa,' says I, 'what's the
matter now, old fellow?' 'Look ye here,' says he; 'let's argue the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye,
didn't he?' 'Yes, he did,' says I—'right HERE it was.' 'Very good,' says he—'he used his ivory leg,
didn't he?' 'Yes, he did,' says I. 'Well then,' says he, 'wise Stubb, what have you to complain of?
Didn't he kick with right good will? it wasn't a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No,
you were kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It's an honour; I consider it an
honour. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a
queen, and made garter-knights of; but, be YOUR boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by old Ahab,
and made a wise man of. Remember what I say; BE kicked by him; account his kicks honours; and
on no account kick back; for you can't help yourself, wise Stubb. Don't you see that pyramid?' With
that, he all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to swim off into the air. I snored;
rolled over; and there I was in my hammock! Now, what do you think of that dream, Flask?"
"I don't know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.'"
"May be; may be. But it's made a wise man of me, Flask. D'ye see Ahab standing there,
sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best thing you can do, Flask, is to let the old man alone;
never speak to him, whatever he says. Halloa! What's that he shouts? Hark!"
"Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts!
"If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!
"What do you think of that now, Flask? ain't there a small drop of something queer about that,
eh? A white whale—did ye mark that, man? Look ye—there's something special in the wind. Stand
by for it, Flask. Ahab has that that's bloody on his mind. But, mum; he comes this way."
 CHAPTER 32. Cetology.
Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored,
harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod's weedy hull rolls side by side
with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost
indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations
and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.
It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would now fain put
before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is
here essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.
"No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology," says Captain
Scoresby, A.D. 1820.
"It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry as to the true method of
dividing the cetacea into groups and families.... Utter confusion exists among the historians of this
animal" (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.
"Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters." "Impenetrable veil covering our
knowledge of the cetacea." "A field strewn with thorns." "All these incomplete indications but serve
to torture us naturalists."
Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of zoology
and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a
plenty; and so in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are the men,
small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or in little, written of the
whale. Run over a few:—The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne;
Gesner; Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson; Marten;
Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen;
Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T.
Cheever. But to what ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts
will show.
Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen ever saw living whales; and
but one of them was a real professional harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On
the separate subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing authority. But Scoresby
knew nothing and says nothing of the great sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland
whale is almost unworthy mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper
upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest of the whales. Yet, owing to
the long priority of his claims, and the profound ignorance which, till some seventy years back,
invested the then fabulous or utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which ignorance to this present
day still reigns in all but some few scientific retreats and whale-ports; this usurpation has been
every way complete. Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past
days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was to them the monarch of the
seas. But the time has at last come for a new proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good
people all,—the Greenland whale is deposed,—the great sperm whale now reigneth!
There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living sperm whale before you,
and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale's
and Bennett's; both in their time surgeons to English South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact and
reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale to be found in their volumes is
necessarily small; but so far as it goes, it is of excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific
description. As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any
literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life.
Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if
only an easy outline one for the present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent
laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor
endeavors. I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must
for that very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical description of the
various species, or—in this place at least—to much of any description. My object here is simply to
project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.
But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-Office is equal to it. To grope
down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one's hands among the unspeakable
foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to
hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me. Will he the
(leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam through
libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in
earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to settle.
First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the very vestibule
attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In
his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, "I hereby separate the whales from the fish."
But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and
herring, against Linnaeus's express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same
seas with the Leviathan.
The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales from the waters, he
states as follows: "On account of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their
hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem," and finally, "ex lege naturae jure
meritoque." I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both
messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth
were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.
Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a
fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me. This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what
internal respect does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linnaeus has given you those items.
But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold
blooded.
Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as conspicuously to label him
for all time to come? To be short, then, a whale is A SPOUTING FISH WITH A HORIZONTAL TAIL.
There you have him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded meditation. A
walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a fish, because he is amphibious. But the
last term of the definition is still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have
noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a vertical, or up-and-down tail.
Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a
horizontal position.
By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude from the leviathanic
brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers;
nor, on the other hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as alien.* Hence, all the
smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish must be included in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now,
then, come the grand divisions of the entire whale host.
*I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and Dugongs (Pig-fish and
Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included by many naturalists among the whales. But as
these pig-fish are a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on
wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as whales; and have
presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology.
First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into
CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all, both small and large.
 I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.
As the type of the FOLIO I present the SPERM WHALE; of the OCTAVO, the GRAMPUS; of the
DUODECIMO, the PORPOISE.
FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:—I. The SPERM WHALE; II. the
RIGHT WHALE; III. the FIN-BACK WHALE; IV. the HUMP-BACKED WHALE; V. the RAZOR-
BACK WHALE; VI. the SULPHUR-BOTTOM WHALE.
BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER I. (SPERM WHALE).—This whale, among the English of old
vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the
present Cachalot of the French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the
Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe; the most formidable of all
whales to encounter; the most majestic in aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce;
he being the only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is obtained. All his
peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged upon. It is chiefly with his name that I now have
to do. Philologically considered, it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was
almost wholly unknown in his own proper individuality, and when his oil was only accidentally
obtained from the stranded fish; in those days spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly supposed
to be derived from a creature identical with the one then known in England as the Greenland or
Right Whale. It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the
Greenland Whale which the first syllable of the word literally expresses. In those times, also,
spermaceti was exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only as an ointment and
medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb.
When, as I opine, in the course of time, the true nature of spermaceti became known, its original
name was still retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its value by a notion so strangely
significant of its scarcity. And so the appellation must at last have come to be bestowed upon the
whale from which this spermaceti was really derived.
BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER II. (RIGHT WHALE).—In one respect this is the most venerable of
the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted by man. It yields the article commonly known as
whalebone or baleen; and the oil specially known as "whale oil," an inferior article in commerce.
Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by all the following titles: The Whale; the
Greenland Whale; the Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale. There is a
deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus multitudinously baptised. What then is
the whale, which I include in the second species of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the
English naturalists; the Greenland Whale of the English whalemen; the Baliene Ordinaire of the
French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the Swedes. It is the whale which for more than two
centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch and English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale which
the American fishermen have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor'
West Coast, and various other parts of the world, designated by them Right Whale Cruising
Grounds.
Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the English and the right
whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree in all their grand features; nor has there yet been
presented a single determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by endless
subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that some departments of natural
history become so repellingly intricate. The right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length,
with reference to elucidating the sperm whale.
BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER III. (FIN-BACK).—Under this head I reckon a monster which, by the
various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is
commonly the whale whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the Atlantic, in
the New York packet-tracks. In the length he attains, and in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the
right whale, but is of a less portly girth, and a lighter colour, approaching to olive. His great lips
present a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds of large wrinkles. His grand
distinguishing feature, the fin, from which he derives his name, is often a conspicuous object. This
fin is some three or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder part of the back, of an angular
shape, and with a very sharp pointed end. Even if not the slightest other part of the creature be
visible, this isolated fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When the sea is
moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and
casts shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle
surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved on it. On that
Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back. The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater,
as some men are man-haters. Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in
the remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet rising like a tall misanthropic
spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy
all present pursuit from man; this leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable Cain of his
race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back. From having the baleen in his mouth, the Fin-
Back is sometimes included with the right whale, among a theoretic species denominated
WHALEBONE WHALES, that is, whales with baleen. Of these so called Whalebone whales, there
would seem to be several varieties, most of which, however, are little known. Broad-nosed whales
and beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated
whales, are the fishermen's names for a few sorts.
In connection with this appellative of "Whalebone whales," it is of great importance to mention,
that however such a nomenclature may be convenient in facilitating allusions to some kind of
whales, yet it is in vain to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan, founded upon either his
baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth; notwithstanding that those marked parts or features very obviously
seem better adapted to afford the basis for a regular system of Cetology than any other detached
bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his kinds, presents. How then? The baleen, hump, back-fin,
and teeth; these are things whose peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of
whales, without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in other and more essential
particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the humpbacked whale, each has a hump; but there the
similitude ceases. Then, this same humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these
has baleen; but there again the similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the other parts above
mentioned. In various sorts of whales, they form such irregular combinations; or, in the case of any
one of them detached, such an irregular isolation; as utterly to defy all general methodization
formed upon such a basis. On this rock every one of the whale-naturalists has split.
But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the whale, in his anatomy—there, at
least, we shall be able to hit the right classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the
Greenland whale's anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have seen that by his baleen it
is impossible correctly to classify the Greenland whale. And if you descend into the bowels of the
various leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth part as available to the
systematizer as those external ones already enumerated. What then remains? nothing but to take
hold of the whales bodily, in their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way. And this is the
Bibliographical system here adopted; and it is the only one that can possibly succeed, for it alone
is practicable. To proceed.
BOOK I. (FOLIO) CHAPTER IV. (HUMP-BACK).—This whale is often seen on the northern
American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and towed into harbor. He has a great
pack on him like a peddler; or you might call him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate, the
popular name for him does not sufficiently distinguish him, since the sperm whale also has a hump
though a smaller one. His oil is not very valuable. He has baleen. He is the most gamesome and
light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any other of
them.
BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER V. (RAZOR-BACK).—Of this whale little is known but his name. I
have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a retiring nature, he eludes both hunters and
philosophers. Though no coward, he has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which rises
in a long sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does anybody else.
BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER VI. (SULPHUR-BOTTOM).—Another retiring gentleman, with a
brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder
divings. He is seldom seen; at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas,
and then always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is never chased; he would
run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say
nothing more that is true of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.
Thus ends BOOK I. (FOLIO), and now begins BOOK II. (OCTAVO).
OCTAVOES.*—These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which present may
be numbered:—I., the GRAMPUS; II., the BLACK FISH; III., the NARWHALE; IV., the THRASHER;
V., the KILLER.
*Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain. Because, while the
whales of this order, though smaller than those of the former order, nevertheless retain a
proportionate likeness to them in figure, yet the bookbinder's Quarto volume in its dimensioned
form does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume does.
BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER I. (GRAMPUS).—Though this fish, whose loud sonorous
breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of
the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among whales. But possessing all the grand distinctive
features of the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him for one. He is of moderate octavo
size, varying from fifteen to twenty-five feet in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the
waist. He swims in herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is considerable in quantity,
and pretty good for light. By some fishermen his approach is regarded as premonitory of the
advance of the great sperm whale.
BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER II. (BLACK FISH).—I give the popular fishermen's names for all
these fish, for generally they are the best. Where any name happens to be vague or inexpressive, I
shall say so, and suggest another. I do so now, touching the Black Fish, so-called, because
blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So, call him the Hyena Whale, if you please. His
voracity is well known, and from the circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are curved
upwards, he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This whale averages some
sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost all latitudes. He has a peculiar way of
showing his dorsal hooked fin in swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose. When not
more profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena whale, to keep
up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment—as some frugal housekeepers, in the
absence of company, and quite alone by themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax.
Though their blubber is very thin, some of these whales will yield you upwards of thirty gallons of
oil.
BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER III. (NARWHALE), that is, NOSTRIL WHALE.—Another
instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose from his peculiar horn being originally
mistaken for a peaked nose. The creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages
five feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly speaking, this horn is but
a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw in a line a little depressed from the horizontal. But it is
only found on the sinister side, which has an ill effect, giving its owner something analogous to the
aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. What precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it
would be hard to say. It does not seem to be used like the blade of the sword-fish and bill-fish;
though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs it for a rake in turning over the bottom of the
sea for food. Charley Coffin said it was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the
surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks
through. But you cannot prove either of these surmises to be correct. My own opinion is, that
however this one-sided horn may really be used by the Narwhale—however that may be—it would
certainly be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets. The Narwhale I have heard
called the Tusked whale, the Horned whale, and the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a curious
example of the Unicornism to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature. From certain
cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same sea-unicorn's horn was in ancient days
regarded as the great antidote against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense
prices. It was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the horns of the
male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it was in itself accounted an object of great
curiosity. Black Letter tells me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen
Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of Greenwich Palace, as his bold
ship sailed down the Thames; "when Sir Martin returned from that voyage," saith Black Letter, "on
bended knees he presented to her highness a prodigious long horn of the Narwhale, which for a
long period after hung in the castle at Windsor." An Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on
bended knees, did likewise present to her highness another horn, pertaining to a land beast of the
unicorn nature.
The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a milk-white ground colour,
dotted with round and oblong spots of black. His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there is little
of it, and he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.
BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER IV. (KILLER).—Of this whale little is precisely known to the
Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a
distance, I should say that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage—a sort of
Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and hangs there like a leech,
till the mighty brute is worried to death. The Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he
has. Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground of its
indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included.
BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER V. (THRASHER).—This gentleman is famous for his tail, which
he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He mounts the Folio whale's back, and as he swims, he
works his passage by flogging him; as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a similar
process. Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both are outlaws, even in the lawless
seas.
Thus ends BOOK II. (OCTAVO), and begins BOOK III. (DUODECIMO).
DUODECIMOES.—These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza Porpoise. II. The Algerine
Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.
To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may possibly seem strange, that
fishes not commonly exceeding four or five feet should be marshalled among WHALES—a word,
which, in the popular sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the creatures set down
above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my definition of what a whale is—i.e.
a spouting fish, with a horizontal tail.
BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER 1. (HUZZA PORPOISE).—This is the common porpoise
found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own bestowal; for there are more than one sort
of porpoises, and something must be done to distinguish them. I call him thus, because he always
swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps
in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner. Full of
fine spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows to windward. They are the lads that always
live before the wind. They are accounted a lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three cheers
at beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly gamesomeness is not in
ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza Porpoise will yield you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and
delicate fluid extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request among jewellers and
watchmakers. Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise meat is good eating, you know. It may never
have occurred to you that a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very readily
discernible. But the next time you have a chance, watch him; and you will then see the great Sperm
whale himself in miniature.
BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER II. (ALGERINE PORPOISE).—A pirate. Very savage. He
is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is somewhat larger than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of
the same general make. Provoke him, and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered for him many
times, but never yet saw him captured.
BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER III. (MEALY-MOUTHED PORPOISE).—The largest kind of
Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it is known. The only English name, by which he
has hitherto been designated, is that of the fishers—Right-Whale Porpoise, from the circumstance
that he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio. In shape, he differs in some degree from the
Huzza Porpoise, being of a less rotund and jolly girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and gentleman-
like figure. He has no fins on his back (most other porpoises have), he has a lovely tail, and
sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his mealy-mouth spoils all. Though his entire back
down to his side fins is of a deep sable, yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship's hull,
called the "bright waist," that line streaks him from stem to stern, with two separate colours, black
above and white below. The white comprises part of his head, and the whole of his mouth, which
makes him look as if he had just escaped from a felonious visit to a meal-bag. A most mean and
mealy aspect! His oil is much like that of the common porpoise.
Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as the Porpoise is the
smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of
uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by reputation,
but not personally. I shall enumerate them by their fore-castle appellations; for possibly such a list
may be valuable to future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If any of the
following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then he can readily be incorporated into
this System, according to his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:—The Bottle-Nose Whale;
the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon
Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog
Whale; the Blue Whale; etc. From Icelandic, Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be
quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names. But I omit them
as altogether obsolete; and can hardly help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism,
but signifying nothing.
Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected.
You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System
standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still
standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first
architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever
completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh,
Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
 CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.
Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place as any to set down a little
domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers,
a class unknown of course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.
The large importance attached to the harpooneer's vocation is evinced by the fact, that originally
in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries and more ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly
lodged in the person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an officer called the
Specksnyder. Literally this word means Fat-Cutter; usage, however, in time made it equivalent to
Chief Harpooneer. In those days, the captain's authority was restricted to the navigation and
general management of the vessel; while over the whale-hunting department and all its concerns,
the Specksnyder or Chief Harpooneer reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under
the corrupted title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained, but his former dignity is
sadly abridged. At present he ranks simply as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the
captain's more inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good conduct of the harpooneers the
success of a whaling voyage largely depends, and since in the American Fishery he is not only an
important officer in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling ground)
the command of the ship's deck is also his; therefore the grand political maxim of the sea
demands, that he should nominally live apart from the men before the mast, and be in some way
distinguished as their professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as their
social equal.
Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is this—the first lives aft, the
last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with the
captain; and so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in the after part
of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the captain's cabin, and sleep in a place
indirectly communicating with it.
Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest of all voyages now or
ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and the community of interest prevailing among a
company, all of whom, high or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their
common luck, together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and hard work; though all these
things do in some cases tend to beget a less rigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally;
yet, never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian family these whalemen may, in some
primitive instances, live together; for all that, the punctilious externals, at least, of the quarter-deck
are seldom materially relaxed, and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket
ships in which you will see the skipper parading his quarter-deck with an elated grandeur not
surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting almost as much outward homage as if he wore the
imperial purple, and not the shabbiest of pilot-cloth.
And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least given to that sort of
shallowest assumption; and though the only homage he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous
obedience; though he required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon the
quarter-deck; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar circumstances connected with
events hereafter to be detailed, he addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or
IN TERROREM, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means unobservant of the
paramount forms and usages of the sea.
Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms and usages, as it
were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally making use of them for other and more private
ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain, which
had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through those forms that same sultanism
became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship. For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will, it
can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort
of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is,
that for ever keeps God's true princes of the Empire from the world's hustings; and leaves the
highest honours that this air can give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite
inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority
over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political
superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted
potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire
encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous
centralization. Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest
sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the one now
alluded to.
But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and shagginess; and
in this episode touching Emperors and Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor
old whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings and housings are denied
me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived
for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!
 CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.
It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread face from the cabin-
scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and master; who, sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just been
taking an observation of the sun; and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on the smooth,
medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that daily purpose on the upper part of his ivory leg. From his
complete inattention to the tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. But
presently, catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to the deck, and in an even,
unexhilarated voice, saying, "Dinner, Mr. Starbuck," disappears into the cabin.
When the last echo of his sultan's step has died away, and Starbuck, the first Emir, has every
reason to suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns
along the planks, and, after a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some touch of pleasantness,
"Dinner, Mr. Stubb," and descends the scuttle. The second Emir lounges about the rigging awhile,
and then slightly shaking the main brace, to see whether it will be all right with that important rope,
he likewise takes up the old burden, and with a rapid "Dinner, Mr. Flask," follows after his
predecessors.
But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck, seems to feel relieved from
some curious restraint; for, tipping all sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking
off his shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right over the Grand Turk's
head; and then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes
down rollicking so far at least as he remains visible from the deck, reversing all other processions,
by bringing up the rear with music. But ere stepping into the cabin doorway below, he pauses,
ships a new face altogether, and, then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab's
presence, in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.
It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense artificialness of sea-usages, that
while in the open air of the deck some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and
defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those very officers the next moment
go down to their customary dinner in that same commander's cabin, and straightway their
inoffensive, not to say deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of the table;
this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this difference? A problem? Perhaps not.
To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but
courteously, therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he who in the
rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own private dinner-table of invited guests, that
man's unchallenged power and dominion of individual influence for the time; that man's royalty of
state transcends Belshazzar's, for Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who has but once dined his
friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar. It is a witchery of social czarship which there is no
withstanding. Now, if to this consideration you superadd the official supremacy of a ship-master,
then, by inference, you will derive the cause of that peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned.
Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on the white coral beach,
surrounded by his warlike but still deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to be
served. They were as little children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab, there seemed not to lurk the
smallest social arrogance. With one mind, their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man's knife,
as he carved the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that for the world they would have
profaned that moment with the slightest observation, even upon so neutral a topic as the weather.
No! And when reaching out his knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked, Ahab
thereby motioned Starbuck's plate towards him, the mate received his meat as though receiving
alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started if, perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and
chewed it noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without circumspection. For, like the Coronation
banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly dines with the seven Imperial
Electors, so these cabin meals were somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at
table old Ahab forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb. What a relief it was to choking
Stubb, when a rat made a sudden racket in the hold below. And poor little Flask, he was the
youngest son, and little boy of this weary family party. His were the shinbones of the saline beef;
his would have been the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help himself, this must have
seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the first degree. Had he helped himself at that table,
doubtless, never more would he have been able to hold his head up in this honest world;
nevertheless, strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped himself, the chances
were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all, did Flask presume to help himself to
butter. Whether he thought the owners of the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his
clear, sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such marketless
waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask,
alas! was a butterless man!
Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and Flask is the first man up.
Consider! For hereby Flask's dinner was badly jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both
had the start of him; and yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb even, who
is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small appetite, and soon shows symptoms
of concluding his repast, then Flask must bestir himself, he will not get more than three mouthfuls
that day; for it is against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck. Therefore it was that
Flask once admitted in private, that ever since he had arisen to the dignity of an officer, from that
moment he had never known what it was to be otherwise than hungry, more or less. For what he
ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him. Peace and satisfaction, thought
Flask, have for ever departed from my stomach. I am an officer; but, how I wish I could fish a bit of
old-fashioned beef in the forecastle, as I used to when I was before the mast. There's the fruits of
promotion now; there's the vanity of glory: there's the insanity of life! Besides, if it were so that any
mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask's official capacity, all that sailor
had to do, in order to obtain ample vengeance, was to go aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at
Flask through the cabin sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab.
Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first table in the Pequod's cabin.
After their departure, taking place in inverted order to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared, or
rather was restored to some hurried order by the pallid steward. And then the three harpooneers
were bidden to the feast, they being its residuary legatees. They made a sort of temporary
servants' hall of the high and mighty cabin.
In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless invisible domineerings of the
captain's table, was the entire care-free license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those
inferior fellows the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the sound of the
hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed their food with such a relish that there was a
report to it. They dined like lords; they filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading with
spices. Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out the vacancies made
by the previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was fain to bring on a great baron of salt-junk,
seemingly quarried out of the solid ox. And if he were not lively about it, if he did not go with a
nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting
a fork at his back, harpoon-wise. And once Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted Dough-
Boy's memory by snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head into a great empty wooden
trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out the circle preliminary to scalping him. He
was naturally a very nervous, shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny
of a bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse. And what with the standing spectacle of the black terrific
Ahab, and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these three savages, Dough-Boy's whole life
was one continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they
demanded, he would escape from their clutches into his little pantry adjoining, and fearfully peep
out at them through the blinds of its door, till all was over.
It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing his filed teeth to the
Indian's: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on the floor, for a bench would have brought his
hearse-plumed head to the low carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the low
cabin framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes passenger in a ship. But for all this,
the great negro was wonderfully abstemious, not to say dainty. It seemed hardly possible that by
such comparatively small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad,
baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage fed strong and drank deep of the
abounding element of air; and through his dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds.
Not by beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a mortal, barbaric
smack of the lip in eating—an ugly sound enough—so much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy
almost looked to see whether any marks of teeth lurked in his own lean arms. And when he would
hear Tashtego singing out for him to produce himself, that his bones might be picked, the simple-
witted steward all but shattered the crockery hanging round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of
the palsy. Nor did the whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for their lances
and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner, they would ostentatiously sharpen their
knives; that grating sound did not at all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget
that in his Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some murderous,
convivial indiscretions. Alas! Dough-Boy! hard fares the white waiter who waits upon cannibals.
Not a napkin should he carry on his arm, but a buckler. In good time, though, to his great delight,
the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous, fable-mongering ears, all their
martial bones jingling in them at every step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.
But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived there; still, being anything
but sedentary in their habits, they were scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just before
sleeping-time, when they passed through it to their own peculiar quarters.
In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale captains, who, as a set,
rather incline to the opinion that by rights the ship's cabin belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy
alone that anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real truth, the mates and
harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly be said to have lived out of the cabin than in it.
For when they did enter it, it was something as a street-door enters a house; turning inwards for a
moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a permanent thing, residing in the open air. Nor did
they lose much hereby; in the cabin was no companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible.
Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the
world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer
had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the
winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab's soul, shut up in
the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!
 CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the other seamen my first mast-
head came round.
In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously with the
vessel's leaving her port; even though she may have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere
reaching her proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years' voyage she is drawing
nigh home with anything empty in her—say, an empty vial even—then, her mast-heads are kept
manned to the last; and not till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she
altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.
Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very ancient and interesting
one, let us in some measure expatiate here. I take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were
the old Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them. For though their
progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest
mast-head in all Asia, or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great stone mast
of theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the dread gale of God's wrath; therefore, we
cannot give these Babel builders priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a nation
of mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the general belief among archaeologists, that
the first pyramids were founded for astronomical purposes: a theory singularly supported by the
peculiar stair-like formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious long
upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new
stars; even as the look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight. In
Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the
desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground
with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who
was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing
everything out to the last, literally died at his post. Of modern standers-of-mast-heads we have but
a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and bronze men; who, though well capable of facing out a stiff gale,
are still entirely incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering any strange sight.
There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the column of Vendome, stands with arms folded, some
one hundred and fifty feet in the air; careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis
Philippe, Louis Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on his towering
main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules' pillars, his column marks that point of human
grandeur beyond which few mortals will go. Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal,
stands his mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that London smoke,
token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is smoke, must be fire. But neither
great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however madly
invoked to befriend by their counsels the distracted decks upon which they gaze; however it may
be surmised, that their spirits penetrate through the thick haze of the future, and descry what
shoals and what rocks must be shunned.
It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head standers of the land with
those of the sea; but that in truth it is not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the
sole historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells us, that in the early times of
the whale fishery, ere ships were regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that
island erected lofty spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by means of nailed
cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house. A few years ago this same plan was
adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand, who, upon descrying the game, gave notice to the
ready-manned boats nigh the beach. But this custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to
the one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea. The three mast-heads are kept manned
from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each
other every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-
head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the
silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and
between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed
between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite
series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy
trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life,
a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling
accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no
domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what
you shall have for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks,
and your bill of fare is immutable.
In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years' voyage, as often happens, the
sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head would amount to several entire months. And
it is much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion of the whole
term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute of anything approaching to a cosy
inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed,
a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small and snug
contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your most usual point of perch is the
head of the t' gallant-mast, where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to
whalemen) called the t' gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about
as cosy as he would standing on a bull's horns. To be sure, in cold weather you may carry your
house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat; but properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is
no more of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its fleshy tabernacle,
and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out of it, without running great risk of perishing
(like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of a
house as it is a mere envelope, or additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest of
drawers in your body, and no more can you make a convenient closet of your watch-coat.
Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a southern whale ship are
unprovided with those enviable little tents or pulpits, called CROW'S-NESTS, in which the look-
outs of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In the
fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled "A Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the
Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old
Greenland;" in this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a charmingly
circumstantial account of the then recently invented CROW'S-NEST of the Glacier, which was the
name of Captain Sleet's good craft. He called it the SLEET'S CROW'S-NEST, in honour of
himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous false delicacy, and
holding that if we call our own children after our own names (we fathers being the original inventors
and patentees), so likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other apparatus we may
beget. In shape, the Sleet's crow's-nest is something like a large tierce or pipe; it is open above,
however, where it is furnished with a movable side-screen to keep to windward of your head in a
hard gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it through a little trap-hatch in the
bottom. On the after side, or side next the stern of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker
underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather rack, in which to keep your
speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in
person stood his mast-head in this crow's-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him
(also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping off the
stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot
at them from the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon them is a very
different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the
little detailed conveniences of his crow's-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many of these, and
though he treats us to a very scientific account of his experiments in this crow's-nest, with a small
compass he kept there for the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is called the
"local attraction" of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to the horizontal vicinity of the iron in
the ship's planks, and in the Glacier's case, perhaps, to there having been so many broken-down
blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though the Captain is very discreet and scientific here, yet,
for all his learned "binnacle deviations," "azimuth compass observations," and "approximate
errors," he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in those profound
magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted occasionally towards that well replenished little
case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of his crow's nest, within easy reach of his hand.
Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain;
yet I take it very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful
friend and comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers and hooded head he was
studying the mathematics aloft there in that bird's nest within three or four perches of the pole.
But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain Sleet and his
Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting
serenity of those seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I used to lounge
up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off
duty whom I might find there; then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the
top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at last mount to my ultimate
destination.
Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the
problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I—being left completely to myself at such a
thought-engendering altitude—how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-
ships' standing orders, "Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time."
And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of
enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable
meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware
of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed
young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the
richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an
asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking
cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches
himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase
ejaculates:—
"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in
vain."
Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task,
upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient "interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so
hopelessly lost to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see
whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is
imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their
opera-glasses at home.
"Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads, "we've been cruising now hard
upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever
thou art up here." Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far
horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this
absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his
identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul,
pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes
him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the
embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In
this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and
space; like Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round
globe over.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her,
borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this
dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back
in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with
one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise
for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
 CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
(ENTER AHAB: THEN, ALL)
It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab,
as was his wont, ascended the cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk
at that hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the garden.
Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old rounds, upon planks so
familiar to his tread, that they were all over dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of
his walk. Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see
still stranger foot-prints—the foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.
But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as his nervous step that
morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he
made, now at the main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that thought turn in him
as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely possessing him, indeed, that it all but
seemed the inward mould of every outer movement.
"D'ye mark him, Flask?" whispered Stubb; "the chick that's in him pecks the shell. 'Twill soon be
out."
The hours wore on;—Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the deck, with the same
intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.
It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the bulwarks, and inserting his bone
leg into the auger-hole there, and with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send
everybody aft.
"Sir!" said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on ship-board except in
some extraordinary case.
"Send everybody aft," repeated Ahab. "Mast-heads, there! come down!"
When the entire ship's company were assembled, and with curious and not wholly
unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm
is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the
crew, started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him resumed his heavy turns
upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the
wondering whispering among the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must
have summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat. But this did not last
long. Vehemently pausing, he cried:—
"What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?"
"Sing out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.
"Good!" cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which
his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.
"And what do ye next, men?"
"Lower away, and after him!"
"And what tune is it ye pull to, men?"
"A dead whale or a stove boat!"
More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance of the old man
at every shout; while the mariners began to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was
that they themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.
But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his pivot-hole, with one hand
reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:—
"All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale. Look ye! d'ye
see this Spanish ounce of gold?"—holding up a broad bright coin to the sun—"it is a sixteen dollar
piece, men. D'ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul."
While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was slowly rubbing the gold
piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was
meanwhile lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate that it
seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him.
Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with the hammer
uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming:
"Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw;
whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard
fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce,
my boys!"
"Huzza! huzza!" cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the
gold to the mast.
"It's a white whale, I say," resumed Ahab, as he threw down the topmaul: "a white whale. Skin
your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out."
All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even more intense interest
and surprise than the rest, and at the mention of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had
started as if each was separately touched by some specific recollection.
"Captain Ahab," said Tashtego, "that white whale must be the same that some call Moby Dick."
"Moby Dick?" shouted Ahab. "Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?"
"Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?" said the Gay-Header deliberately.
"And has he a curious spout, too," said Daggoo, "very bushy, even for a parmacetty, and mighty
quick, Captain Ahab?"
"And he have one, two, three—oh! good many iron in him hide, too, Captain," cried Queequeg
disjointedly, "all twiske-tee be-twisk, like him—him—" faltering hard for a word, and screwing his
hand round and round as though uncorking a bottle—"like him—him—"
"Corkscrew!" cried Ahab, "aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him;
aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our
Nantucket wool after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib
in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby Dick—Moby Dick!"
"Captain Ahab," said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far been eyeing his
superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed struck with a thought which somewhat
explained all the wonder. "Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick—but it was not Moby Dick
that took off thy leg?"
"Who told thee that?" cried Ahab; then pausing, "Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it
was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now.
Aye, aye," he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; "Aye,
aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever
and a day!" Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: "Aye, aye!
and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and
round perdition's flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase
that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and
rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave."
"Aye, aye!" shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: "A
sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!"
"God bless ye," he seemed to half sob and half shout. "God bless ye, men. Steward! go draw
the great measure of grog. But what's this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the
white whale? art not game for Moby Dick?"
"I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in
the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's
vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it
will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market."
"Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a little lower layer. If money's
to be the measurer, man, and the accountants have computed their great counting-house the
globe, by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that my
vengeance will fetch a great premium HERE!"
"He smites his chest," whispered Stubb, "what's that for? methinks it rings most vast, but hollow."
"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct!
Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."
"Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.
But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning
thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike,
strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?
To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond.
But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable
malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be
the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd
strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is
ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even
that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than
fiends' glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to
anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from
whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder
Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards
—the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid
life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the
whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the
general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. 'Tis but to help
strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best
lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a
whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!—Aye, aye!
thy silence, then, THAT voices thee. (ASIDE) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has
inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion."
"God keep me!—keep us all!" murmured Starbuck, lowly.
But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab did not hear his foreboding
invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the
cordage; nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a moment their hearts sank
in. For again Starbuck's downcast eyes lighted up with the stubbornness of life; the subterranean
laugh died away; the winds blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as before. Ah,
ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But rather are ye predictions than
warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing
things within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in our being, these
still drive us on.
"The measure! the measure!" cried Ahab.
Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he ordered them to produce
their weapons. Then ranging them before him near the capstan, with their harpoons in their hands,
while his three mates stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship's company formed
a circle round the group; he stood for an instant searchingly eyeing every man of his crew. But
those wild eyes met his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of their leader,
ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but, alas! only to fall into the hidden snare of
the Indian.
"Drink and pass!" he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the nearest seaman. "The crew
alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short draughts—long swallows, men; 'tis hot as Satan's
hoof. So, so; it goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the serpent-snapping eye. Well
done; almost drained. That way it went, this way it comes. Hand it me—here's a hollow! Men, ye
seem the years; so brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!
"Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and ye mates, flank me with
your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in,
that I may in some sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men, you will
yet see that—Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner. Hand it me. Why, now, this
pewter had run brimming again, were't not thou St. Vitus' imp—away, thou ague!
"Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let me touch the axis." So
saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre;
while so doing, suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from Starbuck
to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would
fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own
magnetic life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect. Stubb and
Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck fell downright.
"In vain!" cried Ahab; "but, maybe, 'tis well. For did ye three but once take the full-forced shock,
then mine own electric thing, THAT had perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would
have dropped ye dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do appoint
ye three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen there—yon three most honourable gentlemen and
noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain the task? What, when the great Pope washes the feet
of beggars, using his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own condescension, THAT shall
bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!"
Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the detached iron part of their
harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs up, before him.
"Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye not the goblet end? Turn
up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers, advance. The irons! take them; hold them while I fill!"
Forthwith, slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon sockets with the fiery
waters from the pewter.
"Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow them, ye who are now
made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha! Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now
waits to sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful
whaleboat's bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!"
The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale,
the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and
shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds among the frantic crew;
when, waving his free hand to them, they all dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.
 CHAPTER 37. Sunset.
THE CABIN; BY THE STERN WINDOWS; AHAB SITTING ALONE, AND GAZING OUT.
I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows
sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.
Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs
the blue. The diver sun—slow dived from noon—goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with
her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it
bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that
dazzlingly confounds. 'Tis iron—that I know—not gold. 'Tis split, too—that I feel; the jagged edge
galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that
needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!
Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset
soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er
enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and
most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night—good night! (WAVING HIS
HAND, HE MOVES FROM THE WINDOW.)
'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits
into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all
stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be
wasting! What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad—Starbuck
does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to
comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I
now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller
one. That's more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye
pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies—Take
some one of your own size; don't pommel ME! No, ye've knocked me down, and I am up again; but
YE have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye.
Come, Ahab's compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot
swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed
purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through
the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's
an angle to the iron way!
 CHAPTER 38. Dusk.
BY THE MAINMAST; STARBUCK LEANING AGAINST IT.
My soul is more than matched; she's overmanned; and by a madman! Insufferable sting, that
sanity should ground arms on such a field! But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out
of me! I think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing
has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who's over him,
he cries;—aye, he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below! Oh! I
plainly see my miserable office,—to obey, rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in
his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow
wide. The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the small gold-fish has its glassy
globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead.
But my whole clock's run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.
[A BURST OF REVELRY FROM THE FORECASTLE.]
Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them!
Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal
orgies! that revelry is forward! mark the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost
through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but only to drag dark Ahab
after it, where he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the wake, and
further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills me through! Peace! ye revellers, and
set the watch! Oh, life! 'tis in an hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge,—as wild,
untutored things are forced to feed—Oh, life! 'tis now that I do feel the latent horror in thee! but 'tis
not me! that horror's out of me! and with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye,
ye grim, phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!
 CHAPTER 39. First Night Watch.
Fore-Top.
(STUBB SOLUS, AND MENDING A BRACE.)
Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!—I've been thinking over it ever since, and that ha, ha's the
final consequence. Why so? Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and
come what will, one comfort's always left—that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated. I heard not
all his talk with Starbuck; but to my poor eye Starbuck then looked something as I the other
evening felt. Be sure the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the gift, might
readily have prophesied it—for when I clapped my eye upon his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, WISE
Stubb—that's my title—well, Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here's a carcase. I know not all that may be
coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your
horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra, skirra! What's my juicy little pear at home doing now? Crying its
eyes out?—Giving a party to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay as a frigate's pennant,
and so am I—fa, la! lirra, skirra! Oh—
We'll drink to-night with hearts as light, To love, as gay and fleeting As bubbles that swim, on the
beaker's brim, And break on the lips while meeting.
A brave stave that—who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir—(ASIDE) he's my superior, he has
his too, if I'm not mistaken.—Aye, aye, sir, just through with this job—coming.
 CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.
HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.
(FORESAIL RISES AND DISCOVERS THE WATCH STANDING, LOUNGING, LEANING, AND
LYING IN VARIOUS ATTITUDES, ALL SINGING IN CHORUS.)

Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies!

Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!
Our captain's commanded.—

1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR. Oh, boys, don't be sentimental; it's bad for the digestion! Take a
tonic, follow me! (SINGS, AND ALL FOLLOW)

Our captain stood upon the deck,

A spy-glass in his hand,
A viewing of those gallant whales
That blew at every strand.
Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys,
And by your braces stand,
And we'll have one of those fine whales,
Hand, boys, over hand!
So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail!
While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!

MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Eight bells there, forward!

2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR. Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d'ye hear, bell-boy? Strike the
bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me call the watch. I've the sort of mouth for that—the
hogshead mouth. So, so, (THRUSTS HIS HEAD DOWN THE SCUTTLE,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-
y! Eight bells there below! Tumble up!
DUTCH SAILOR. Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I mark this in our old Mogul's
wine; it's quite as deadening to some as filliping to others. We sing; they sleep—aye, lie down
there, like ground-tier butts. At 'em again! There, take this copper-pump, and hail 'em through it.
Tell 'em to avast dreaming of their lasses. Tell 'em it's the resurrection; they must kiss their last, and
come to judgment. That's the way—THAT'S it; thy throat ain't spoiled with eating Amsterdam butter.
FRENCH SAILOR. Hist, boys! let's have a jig or two before we ride to anchor in Blanket Bay.
What say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand by all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your
tambourine!
PIP. (SULKY AND SLEEPY) Don't know where it is.
FRENCH SAILOR. Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I say; merry's the word;
hurrah! Damn me, won't you dance? Form, now, Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle?
Throw yourselves! Legs! legs!
ICELAND SAILOR. I don't like your floor, maty; it's too springy to my taste. I'm used to ice-floors.
I'm sorry to throw cold water on the subject; but excuse me.
MALTESE SAILOR. Me too; where's your girls? Who but a fool would take his left hand by his
right, and say to himself, how d'ye do? Partners! I must have partners!
SICILIAN SAILOR. Aye; girls and a green!—then I'll hop with ye; yea, turn grasshopper!
LONG-ISLAND SAILOR. Well, well, ye sulkies, there's plenty more of us. Hoe corn when you
may, say I. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here comes the music; now for it!
AZORE SAILOR. (ASCENDING, AND PITCHING THE TAMBOURINE UP THE SCUTTLE.)
Here you are, Pip; and there's the windlass-bitts; up you mount! Now, boys! (THE HALF OF THEM
DANCE TO THE TAMBOURINE; SOME GO BELOW; SOME SLEEP OR LIE AMONG THE
COILS OF RIGGING. OATHS A-PLENTY.)
AZORE SAILOR. (DANCING) Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy!
Make fire-flies; break the jinglers!
PIP. Jinglers, you say?—there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so.
CHINA SAILOR. Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself.
FRENCH SAILOR. Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it! Split jibs! tear
yourselves!
TASHTEGO. (QUIETLY SMOKING) That's a white man; he calls that fun: humph! I save my
sweat.
OLD MANX SAILOR. I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what they are dancing
over. I'll dance over your grave, I will—that's the bitterest threat of your night-women, that beat
head-winds round corners. O Christ! to think of the green navies and the green-skulled crews!
Well, well; belike the whole world's a ball, as you scholars have it; and so 'tis right to make one
ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you're young; I was once.
3D NANTUCKET SAILOR. Spell oh!—whew! this is worse than pulling after whales in a calm
—give us a whiff, Tash.
(THEY CEASE DANCING, AND GATHER IN CLUSTERS. MEANTIME THE SKY DARKENS
—THE WIND RISES.)
LASCAR SAILOR. By Brahma! boys, it'll be douse sail soon. The sky-born, high-tide Ganges
turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!
MALTESE SAILOR. (RECLINING AND SHAKING HIS CAP.) It's the waves—the snow's caps
turn to jig it now. They'll shake their tassels soon. Now would all the waves were women, then I'd go
drown, and chassee with them evermore! There's naught so sweet on earth—heaven may not
match it!—as those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms
hide such ripe, bursting grapes.
SICILIAN SAILOR. (RECLINING.) Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad—fleet interlacings of the limbs
—lithe swayings—coyings—flutterings! lip! heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste,
observe ye, else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? (NUDGING.)
TAHITAN SAILOR. (RECLINING ON A MAT.) Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls!—the
Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid!
I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat! green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn and wilted
quite. Ah me!—not thou nor I can bear the change! How then, if so be transplanted to yon sky?
Hear I the roaring streams from Pirohitee's peak of spears, when they leap down the crags and
drown the villages?—The blast! the blast! Up, spine, and meet it! (LEAPS TO HIS FEET.)
PORTUGUESE SAILOR. How the sea rolls swashing 'gainst the side! Stand by for reefing,
hearties! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell they'll go lunging presently.
DANISH SAILOR. Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou holdest! Well done! The
mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He's no more afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight
the Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!
4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab tell him he must
always kill a squall, something as they burst a waterspout with a pistol—fire your ship right into it!
ENGLISH SAILOR. Blood! but that old man's a grand old cove! We are the lads to hunt him up
his whale!
 ALL. Aye! aye!
OLD MANX SAILOR. How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree to live when
shifted to any other soil, and here there's none but the crew's cursed clay. Steady, helmsman!
steady. This is the sort of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea.
Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there's another in the sky—lurid-like, ye see, all
else pitch black.
DAGGOO. What of that? Who's afraid of black's afraid of me! I'm quarried out of it!
SPANISH SAILOR. (ASIDE.) He wants to bully, ah!—the old grudge makes me touchy
(ADVANCING.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark side of mankind—devilish dark
at that. No offence.
DAGGOO (GRIMLY). None.
ST. JAGO'S SAILOR. That Spaniard's mad or drunk. But that can't be, or else in his one case
our old Mogul's fire-waters are somewhat long in working.
5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. What's that I saw—lightning? Yes.
SPANISH SAILOR. No; Daggoo showing his teeth.
DAGGOO (SPRINGING). Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!
SPANISH SAILOR (MEETING HIM). Knife thee heartily! big frame, small spirit!
ALL. A row! a row! a row!
TASHTEGO (WITH A WHIFF). A row a'low, and a row aloft—Gods and men—both brawlers!
Humph!
BELFAST SAILOR. A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge in with ye!
ENGLISH SAILOR. Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard's knife! A ring, a ring!
OLD MANX SAILOR. Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring Cain struck Abel.
Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad'st thou the ring?
MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Hands by the halyards! in top-gallant sails!
Stand by to reef topsails!
ALL. The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! (THEY SCATTER.)
PIP (SHRINKING UNDER THE WINDLASS). Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish, crash! there
goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower, Pip, here comes the royal yard! It's worse than
being in the whirled woods, the last day of the year! Who'd go climbing after chestnuts now? But
there they go, all cursing, and here I don't. Fine prospects to 'em; they're on the road to heaven.
Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a squall! But those chaps there are worse yet—they are your white
squalls, they. White squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their chat just now, and
the white whale—shirr! shirr!—but spoken of once! and only this evening—it makes me jingle all
over like my tambourine—that anaconda of an old man swore 'em in to hunt him! Oh, thou big
white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here;
preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!
 CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded
with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the
dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud
seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I
and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.
For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had
haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of
them knew of his existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him; while the
number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to him, was small indeed. For, owing to
the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery
circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so as
seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling
sail of any sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of
sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed the
spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning
Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such
or such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and
malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them;
to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been
no other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and
not unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster attacked; therefore it
was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the
most part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils of the
Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous
encounter between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.
And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance caught sight of him; in
the beginning of the thing they had every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for
him, as for any other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these
assaults—not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations
—but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and
piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave
hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come.
Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more horrify the true histories of
these deadly encounters. For not only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all
surprising terrible events,—as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more
than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to
cling to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery surpasses every
other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes
circulate there. For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and
superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly
brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only
eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that
though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any
chiseled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and
longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all
tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.
No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the widest watery
spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in the end incorporate with themselves all
manner of morbid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which
eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly appears. So
that in many cases such a panic did he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had
heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw.
But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work. Not even at the present day
has the original prestige of the Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of
the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are those this day among
them, who, though intelligent and courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right
whale, would perhaps—either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or timidity, decline
a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are plenty of whalemen, especially among those
whaling nations not sailing under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered the
Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster
primitively pursued in the North; seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish
fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the pre-eminent
tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on
board of those prows which stem him.
And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary times thrown its shadow
before it; we find some book naturalists—Olassen and Povelson—declaring the Sperm Whale not
only to be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so incredibly ferocious
as continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor even down to so late a time as Cuvier's, were
these or almost similar impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron himself affirms
that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are "struck with the most lively terrors,"
and "often in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves against the rocks with such violence
as to cause instantaneous death." And however the general experiences in the fishery may amend
such reports as these; yet in their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the
superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds of the
hunters.
So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of the fishermen
recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was
oftentimes hard to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and
daring warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet
to chase and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to
attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are some
remarkable documents that may be consulted.
Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things were ready to give chase
to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely,
without the specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments,
were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if offered.
One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale in
the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous;
that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.
Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether without some faint
show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet
been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale when
beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time
have originated the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them, especially
concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with
such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.
It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as well a thing placed
upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far north
in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland
seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has been declared that the interval
of time between the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, it
has been believed by some whalemen, that the Nor' West Passage, so long a problem to man,
was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the real living experience of living men, the
prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was
said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more
wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come
from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully
equalled by the realities of the whalemen.
Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing that after repeated,
intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that
some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only
ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should
be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made
to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined
billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen.
But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in the earthly make and
incontestable character of the monster to strike the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was
not so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as
was elsewhere thrown out—a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical
white hump. These were his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless,
uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.
The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue,
that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed,
literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea,
leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings.
Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that
so much invested the whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which,
according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than all,
his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming
before his exulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been
known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to splinters, or
drive them back in consternation to their ship.
Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar disasters, however little
bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the
White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that he caused,
was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.
Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters
were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they
swam out of the white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that
smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain,
seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his
foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain
was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him,
Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned
Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason
was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild
vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came
to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious
agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and
half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even
the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east
reverenced in their statue devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously
transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that
most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that
cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to
crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon
the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam
down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily
dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden,
passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt
the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards
home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one
hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn
body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only
then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems all
but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, though
unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover
intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed,
raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when
running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun'sails spread, floated across the
tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed left behind him with the
Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light and air; even then,
when he bore that firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and
his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self,
raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it
may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but
deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but
unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of
Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great
natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a
furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all
its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to
that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to
bear upon any one reasonable object.
This is much; yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But vain to popularize
profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding far down from within the very heart of this spiked
Hotel de Cluny where we here stand—however grand and wonderful, now quit it;—and take your
way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the
fantastic towers of man's upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in
bearded state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken
throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his
frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls!
question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties;
and from your grim sire only will the old State-secret come.
Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means are sane, my motive
and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to
mankind he did long dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling was only
subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate. Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that
dissembling, that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him
otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the terrible casualty which had
overtaken him.
The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly ascribed to a kindred cause.
And so too, all the added moodiness which always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the
Pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely, that far from
distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the
calculating people of that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very
reasons he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness
as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting
fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his
iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to be
corporeally incapacitated for that, yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer
and howl on his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad
secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the
present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any
one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon
would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They
were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was
intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.
Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job's whale round the
world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and
cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-
mindedness in Starbuck, the invunerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the
pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by
some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly
responded to the old man's ire—by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his
hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this
came to be—what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also,
in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,
—all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that
works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his
pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand
still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-
rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.
 CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale.
What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet
remains unsaid.
Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but
occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague,
nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the
rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a
comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how
can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all
these chapters might be naught.
Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some
special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in
some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings
of Pegu placing the title "Lord of the White Elephants" above all their other magniloquent
ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped
in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and
the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial colour the
same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the
white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has
been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day;
and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of
many touching, noble things—the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red
Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honour; though
in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and
contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the
higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine
spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the
holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a
snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog
was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest
envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though
directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their
sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of
the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though
in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders
stand clothed in white before the great-white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like
wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and
sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more
of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.
This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly
associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest
bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their
smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it
is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb
gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger
courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.*
*With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would fain go still deeper
into this matter, that it is not the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable
hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only rises
from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the
fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together two such opposite
emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming
all this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified terror.
As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in
his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity
is most vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for the
dead begins with "Requiem eternam" (eternal rest), whence REQUIEM denominating the mass
itself, and any other funeral music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this
shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him REQUIN.
Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale
dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but
God's great, unflattering laureate, Nature.*
*I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon
the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there,
dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a
hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace
some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered
cries, as some king's ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes,
methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed
myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had
lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of
plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and
turning, asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney! never had heard that name
before; is it conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some
time after, I learned that goney was some seaman's name for albatross. So that by no possibility
could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had aught to do with those mystical impressions which were
mine, when I saw that bird upon our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird
to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little brighter the noble merit of
the poem and the poet.
I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the
spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey
albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the
Antarctic fowl.
But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will tell; with a treacherous hook
and line, as the fowl floated on the sea. At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered,
leathern tally round its neck, with the ship's time and place; and then letting it escape. But I doubt
not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the
wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim!
Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White Steed of the
Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the
dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of
vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains
and the Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which every
evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail,
invested him with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished
him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western world, which to the eyes
of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked
majestic as a god, bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid his
aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains, like
an Ohio; or whether with his circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White
Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through his cool milkiness; in
whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the bravest Indians he was the object of trembling
reverence and awe. Nor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble
horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness; and that this
divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain
nameless terror.
But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that accessory and strange glory
which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross.
What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that
sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing
expressed by the name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men—has no substantive
deformity—and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely
hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?
Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not the less malicious
agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crowning attribute of the terrible. From its snowy
aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White Squall. Nor, in
some historic instances, has the art of human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it
heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their
faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the market-place!
Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all mankind fail to bear witness
to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the
aspect of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed
that pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation
here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we
wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our
phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that
even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.
Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness,
no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to
the soul.
But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to account for it? To analyse it,
would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of some of those instances wherein this
thing of whiteness—though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped of all direct
associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful, but nevertheless, is found to exert over us the
same sorcery, however modified;—can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us
to the hidden cause we seek?
Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no man
can follow another into these halls. And though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative
impressions about to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were
entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able to recall them now.
Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely acquainted with the peculiar
character of the day, does the bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary,
speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast and hooded with new-fallen snow? Or,
to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the Middle American States, why does the passing
mention of a White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul?
Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and kings (which will not wholly
account for it) that makes the White Tower of London tell so much more strongly on the imagination
of an untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its neighbors—the Byward Tower,
or even the Bloody? And those sublimer towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence,
in peculiar moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention of that name,
while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is full of a soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why,
irrespective of all latitudes and longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a
spectralness over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of long
lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or,
to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the old
fairy tales of Central Europe, does "the tall pale man" of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor
unrustlingly glides through the green of the groves—why is this phantom more terrible than all the
whooping imps of the Blocksburg?
Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the
stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of
her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards
of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a
tossed pack of cards;—it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest,
saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this
whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the
cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an
apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.
I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be
the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative
mind is there aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost solely
consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to
muteness or universality. What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively
elucidated by the following examples.
First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of
breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but
under precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing
through a midnight sea of milky whiteness—as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed
white bears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded
phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he
is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water is under him
again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, "Sir, it was not so much the fear of striking hidden
rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so stirred me?"
Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the snowhowdahed Andes conveys
naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness
reigning at such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to lose
oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the backwoodsman of the West, who
with comparative indifference views an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of
tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the scenery of the
Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air,
he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery,
views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and
splintered crosses.
But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a white flag hung out
from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael.
Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from
all beasts of prey—why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind
him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness—why will he start,
snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in
him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he
smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of former perils; for what
knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?
No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism
in the world. Though thousands of miles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the
rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which this
instant they may be trampling into dust.
 Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of
mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as
the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!
Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth such
hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its
aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with
such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at
once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet
should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the
universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white
depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the
visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons
that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless,
all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural
philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of
sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of
young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on
from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover
nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical
cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white
or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even
tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a
leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon
their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps
all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye
then at the fiery hunt?
 CHAPTER 43. Hark!
"HIST! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?"
It was the middle-watch; a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a cordon, extending from
one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they
passed the buckets to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed precincts of
the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets
went in the deepest silence, only broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the
unceasingly advancing keel.
It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, whose post was near the after-
hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a Cholo, the words above.
"Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?"
"Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d'ye mean?"
"There it is again—under the hatches—don't you hear it—a cough—it sounded like a cough."
"Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket."
"There again—there it is!—it sounds like two or three sleepers turning over, now!"
"Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It's the three soaked biscuits ye eat for supper turning
over inside of ye—nothing else. Look to the bucket!"
"Say what ye will, shipmate; I've sharp ears."
"Aye, you are the chap, ain't ye, that heard the hum of the old Quakeress's knitting-needles fifty
miles at sea from Nantucket; you're the chap."
"Grin away; we'll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody down in the after-hold
that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard
Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the wind."
"Tish! the bucket!"
 CHAPTER 44. The Chart.
Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that took place on the night
succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose with his crew, you would have seen him go to a
locker in the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread them
before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before it, you would have seen him
intently study the various lines and shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady
pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he would refer to
piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and places in which, on
various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen.
While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head, continually
rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon
his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on
the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply
marked chart of his forehead.
But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over
his charts. Almost every night they were brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were
effaced, and others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was
threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that
monomaniac thought of his soul.
Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly
hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not
so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the
driftings of the sperm whale's food; and, also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for
hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to
certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of his prey.
So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the sperm whale's resorting to
given waters, that many hunters believe that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout
the world; were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated, then the
migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in invariability to those of the herring-
shoals or the flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate
migratory charts of the sperm whale.*

*Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne

out by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of
the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By
that circular, it appears that precisely such a chart is in
course of completion; and portions of it are presented in
the circular. "This chart divides the ocean into districts
of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude;
perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve
columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each
of which districts are three lines; one to show the number
of days that have been spent in each month in every
district, and the two others to show the number of days in
which whales, sperm or right, have been seen."

Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the sperm whales,
guided by some infallible instinct—say, rather, secret intelligence from the Deity—mostly swim in
VEINS, as they are called; continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such undeviating
exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with one tithe of such marvellous
precision. Though, in these cases, the direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor's
parallel, and though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable, straight wake,
yet the arbitrary VEIN in which at these times he is said to swim, generally embraces some few
miles in width (more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or contract); but never exceeds the
miles in width (more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or contract); but never exceeds the
visual sweep from the whale-ship's mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone.
The sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating whales
may with great confidence be looked for.
And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate feeding-grounds, could
Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing the widest expanses of water between those
grounds he could, by his art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly
without prospect of a meeting.
There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his delirious but still
methodical scheme. But not so in the reality, perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have
their regular seasons for particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the herds
which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year, say, will turn out to be identically the
same with those that were found there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and
unquestionable instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In general, the same remark,
only within a less wide limit, applies to the solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged sperm
whales. So that though Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what is called
the Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast; yet it did not
follow, that were the Pequod to visit either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding
season, she would infallibly encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding grounds, where
he had at times revealed himself. But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places and
ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab's chances of
accomplishing his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to whatever
way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular set time or place were attained,
when all possibilities would become probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility
the next thing to a certainty. That particular set time and place were conjoined in the one technical
phrase—the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then, for several consecutive years, Moby Dick
had been periodically descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round,
loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of the
deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with his
deeds; there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive
to his vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which
Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his
hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those hopes;
nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his unquiet heart as to postpone all
intervening quest.
Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the Season-on-the-Line. No
possible endeavor then could enable her commander to make the great passage southwards,
double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific
in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season. Yet the premature hour
of the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very
complexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights was
before him; an interval which, instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a
miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from
his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the
Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons,
Pampas, Nor'-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow
Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake.
But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not but a mad idea, this; that in
the broad boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of
individual recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares
of Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump,
could not but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself, as
after poring over his charts till long after midnight he would throw himself back in reveries—tallied
him, and shall he escape? His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep's ear! And
here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race; till a weariness and faintness of pondering
came over him; and in the open air of the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God!
what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful
desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.
Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night,
which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of
phrensies, and whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing
of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these
spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him,
from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down
among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the
ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed
that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent
weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such
times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that
had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again.
The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time
dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or
agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which,
for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the
soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his
one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods
and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and
burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden
and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what
seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless
somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to colour, and therefore
a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he
whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that
vulture the very creature he creates.
 CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.
So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as indirectly touching one
or two very interesting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter,
in its earlier part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume; but the leading matter of it
requires to be still further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood,
and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire subject may
induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main points of this affair.
I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall be content to produce the
desired impression by separate citations of items, practically or reliably known to me as a
whaleman; and from these citations, I take it—the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of itself.
First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after receiving a harpoon, has
effected a complete escape; and, after an interval (in one instance of three years), has been again
struck by the same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same private cypher,
have been taken from the body. In the instance where three years intervened between the flinging
of the two harpoons; and I think it may have been something more than that; the man who darted
them happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there,
joined a discovery party, and penetrated far into the interior, where he travelled for a period of
nearly two years, often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the
other common perils incident to wandering in the heart of unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale
he had struck must also have been on its travels; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe,
brushing with its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose. This man and this whale again
came together, and the one vanquished the other. I say I, myself, have known three instances
similar to this; that is in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second attack, saw the
two irons with the respective marks cut in them, afterwards taken from the dead fish. In the three-
year instance, it so fell out that I was in the boat both times, first and last, and the last time distinctly
recognised a peculiar sort of huge mole under the whale's eye, which I had observed there three
years previous. I say three years, but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here are three
instances, then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have heard of many other instances from
persons whose veracity in the matter there is no good ground to impeach.
Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however ignorant the world ashore may
be of it, that there have been several memorable historical instances where a particular whale in
the ocean has been at distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became
thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily peculiarities as distinguished
from other whales; for however peculiar in that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an
end to his peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly valuable oil. No: the
reason was this: that from the fatal experiences of the fishery there hung a terrible prestige of
perilousness about such a whale as there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most
fishermen were content to recognise him by merely touching their tarpaulins when he would be
discovered lounging by them on the sea, without seeking to cultivate a more intimate
acquaintance. Like some poor devils ashore that happen to know an irascible great man, they
make distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the street, lest if they pursued the acquaintance
further, they might receive a summary thump for their presumption.
But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual celebrity—Nay, you may call
it an ocean-wide renown; not only was he famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories
after death, but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of a name; had as
much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar. Was it not so, O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan,
scarred like an iceberg, who so long did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout
was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack! thou terror of
all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan!
King of Japan, whose lofty jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross
against the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked like an old tortoise with
mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain prose, here are four whales as well known to the
students of Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.
But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at various times creating great havoc
among the boats of different vessels, were finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out,
chased and killed by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with that express
object as much in view, as in setting out through the Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of old
had it in his mind to capture that notorious murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of
the Indian King Philip.
I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make mention of one or two other
things, which to me seem important, as in printed form establishing in all respects the
reasonableness of the whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For this is
one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error. So
ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that
without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout
at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable
allegory.
First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of the general perils of the grand fishery,
yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid conception of those perils, and the frequency with which
they recur. One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters and deaths by
casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home, however transient and immediately
forgotten that record. Do you suppose that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught
by the whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the bottom of the sea by
the sounding leviathan—do you suppose that that poor fellow's name will appear in the newspaper
obituary you will read to-morrow at your breakfast? No: because the mails are very irregular
between here and New Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what might be called regular news direct
or indirect from New Guinea? Yet I tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made to the
Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which had had a death by
a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each lost a boat's crew. For God's sake,
be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's
blood was spilled for it.
Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is an enormous
creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that when narrating to them some specific
example of this two-fold enormousness, they have significantly complimented me upon my
facetiousness; when, I declare upon my soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses,
when he wrote the history of the plagues of Egypt.
But fortunately the special point I here seek can be established upon testimony entirely
independent of my own. That point is this: The Sperm Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful,
knowing, and judiciously malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy, and sink
a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale HAS done it.
First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket, was cruising in the Pacific
Ocean. One day she saw spouts, lowered her boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales.
Ere long, several of the whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale escaping from
the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon the ship. Dashing his forehead
against her hull, he so stove her in, that in less than "ten minutes" she settled down and fell over.
Not a surviving plank of her has been seen since. After the severest exposure, part of the crew
reached the land in their boats. Being returned home at last, Captain Pollard once more sailed for
the Pacific in command of another ship, but the gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks
and breakers; for the second time his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith forswearing the sea, he
has never tempted it since. At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of Nantucket. I have seen
Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy; I have read his plain and
faithful narrative; I have conversed with his son; and all this within a few miles of the scene of the
catastrophe.*
 *The following are extracts from Chace's narrative: "Every fact seemed to warrant me in
concluding that it was anything but chance which directed his operations; he made two several
attacks upon the ship, at a short interval between them, both of which, according to their direction,
were calculated to do us the most injury, by being made ahead, and thereby combining the speed
of the two objects for the shock; to effect which, the exact manoeuvres which he made were
necessary. His aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated resentment and fury. He came
directly from the shoal which we had just before entered, and in which we had struck three of his
companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings." Again: "At all events, the whole
circumstances taken together, all happening before my own eyes, and producing, at the time,
impressions in my mind of decided, calculating mischief, on the part of the whale (many of which
impressions I cannot now recall), induce me to be satisfied that I am correct in my opinion."
Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during a black night an open boat,
when almost despairing of reaching any hospitable shore. "The dark ocean and swelling waters
were nothing; the fears of being swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed upon hidden
rocks, with all the other ordinary subjects of fearful contemplation, seemed scarcely entitled to a
moment's thought; the dismal looking wreck, and THE HORRID ASPECT AND REVENGE OF
THE WHALE, wholly engrossed my reflections, until day again made its appearance."
In another place—p. 45,—he speaks of "THE MYSTERIOUS AND MORTAL ATTACK OF THE
ANIMAL."
Secondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year 1807 totally lost off the Azores by a
similar onset, but the authentic particulars of this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter,
though from the whale hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions to it.
Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J—-, then commanding an American
sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be dining with a party of whaling captains, on board a
Nantucket ship in the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich Islands. Conversation turning upon whales, the
Commodore was pleased to be sceptical touching the amazing strength ascribed to them by the
professional gentlemen present. He peremptorily denied for example, that any whale could so
smite his stout sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful. Very good; but there
is more coming. Some weeks after, the Commodore set sail in this impregnable craft for
Valparaiso. But he was stopped on the way by a portly sperm whale, that begged a few moments'
confidential business with him. That business consisted in fetching the Commodore's craft such a
thwack, that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest port to heave down and
repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider the Commodore's interview with that whale as
providential. Was not Saul of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the
sperm whale will stand no nonsense.
I will now refer you to Langsdorff's Voyages for a little circumstance in point, peculiarly interesting
to the writer hereof. Langsdorff, you must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral
Krusenstern's famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present century. Captain
Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter:
"By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day we were out in the open
sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was very clear and fine, but so intolerably cold that we
were obliged to keep on our fur clothing. For some days we had very little wind; it was not till the
nineteenth that a brisk gale from the northwest sprang up. An uncommon large whale, the body of
which was larger than the ship itself, lay almost at the surface of the water, but was not perceived
by any one on board till the moment when the ship, which was in full sail, was almost upon him, so
that it was impossible to prevent its striking against him. We were thus placed in the most
imminent danger, as this gigantic creature, setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at least
out of the water. The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether, while we who were below all sprang
instantly upon the deck, concluding that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we saw the
monster sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity. Captain D'Wolf applied immediately to
the pumps to examine whether or not the vessel had received any damage from the shock, but we
found that very happily it had escaped entirely uninjured."
 Now, the Captain D'Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship in question, is a New
Englander, who, after a long life of unusual adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the
village of Dorchester near Boston. I have the honour of being a nephew of his. I have particularly
questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff. He substantiates every word. The ship,
however, was by no means a large one: a Russian craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased
by my uncle after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.
In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure, so full, too, of honest wonders—the
voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient Dampier's old chums—I found a little matter set down so
like that just quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a corroborative
example, if such be needed.
Lionel, it seems, was on his way to "John Ferdinando," as he calls the modern Juan Fernandes.
"In our way thither," he says, "about four o'clock in the morning, when we were about one hundred
and fifty leagues from the Main of America, our ship felt a terrible shock, which put our men in such
consternation that they could hardly tell where they were or what to think; but every one began to
prepare for death. And, indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted
the ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a little over, we cast the lead, and
sounded, but found no ground..... The suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their
carriages, and several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who lay
with his head on a gun, was thrown out of his cabin!" Lionel then goes on to impute the shock to an
earthquake, and seems to substantiate the imputation by stating that a great earthquake,
somewhere about that time, did actually do great mischief along the Spanish land. But I should not
much wonder if, in the darkness of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all caused by
an unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath.
I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known to me, of the great
power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more than one instance, he has been known, not
only to chase the assailing boats back to their ships, but to pursue the ship itself, and long
withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks. The English ship Pusie Hall can tell a story on
that head; and, as for his strength, let me say, that there have been examples where the lines
attached to a running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and secured
there; the whale towing her great hull through the water, as a horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is
very often observed that, if the sperm whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts, not
so often with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of destruction to his pursuers; nor is it
without conveying some eloquent indication of his character, that upon being attacked he will
frequently open his mouth, and retain it in that dread expansion for several consecutive minutes.
But I must be content with only one more and a concluding illustration; a remarkable and most
significant one, by which you will not fail to see, that not only is the most marvellous event in this
book corroborated by plain facts of the present day, but that these marvels (like all marvels) are
mere repetitions of the ages; so that for the millionth time we say amen with Solomon—Verily there
is nothing new under the sun.
In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Christian magistrate of Constantinople, in the
days when Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius general. As many know, he wrote the history of
his own times, a work every way of uncommon value. By the best authorities, he has always been
considered a most trustworthy and unexaggerating historian, except in some one or two
particulars, not at all affecting the matter presently to be mentioned.
Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term of his prefecture at
Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of
Marmora, after having destroyed vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty
years. A fact thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is there any reason
it should be. Of what precise species this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed
ships, as well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly inclined to think
a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a long time I fancied that the sperm whale had been
always unknown in the Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even now I am
certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the present constitution of things, a
place for his habitual gregarious resort. But further investigations have recently proved to me, that
in modern times there have been isolated instances of the presence of the sperm whale in the
Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the
British navy found the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of war readily passes through
the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same route, pass out of the Mediterranean
into the Propontis.
In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar substance called BRIT is to be found,
the aliment of the right whale. But I have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale
—squid or cuttle-fish—lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large creatures, but by no means
the largest of that sort, have been found at its surface. If, then, you properly put these statements
together, and reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that, according to all human
reasoning, Procopius's sea-monster, that for half a century stove the ships of a Roman Emperor,
must in all probability have been a sperm whale.
 CHAPTER 46. Surmises.
Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his thoughts and actions ever had
in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick; though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests
to that one passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and long habituation far
too wedded to a fiery whaleman's ways, altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution of the
voyage. Or at least if this were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more
influential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even considering his monomania, to
hint that his vindictiveness towards the White Whale might have possibly extended itself in some
degree to all sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he multiplied
the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would prove to be the hated one he
hunted. But if such an hypothesis be indeed exceptionable, there were still additional
considerations which, though not so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet
were by no means incapable of swaying him.
To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon,
men are most apt to get out of order. He knew, for example, that however magnetic his
ascendency in some respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete
spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual mastership; for to the
purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in a sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck's body and
Starbuck's coerced will were Ahab's, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck's brain; still he
knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain's quest, and could he, would
joyfully disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it. It might be that a long interval would elapse
ere the White Whale was seen. During that long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to fall into
open relapses of rebellion against his captain's leadership, unless some ordinary, prudential,
circumstantial influences were brought to bear upon him. Not only that, but the subtle insanity of
Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative
sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped
of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that the full terror of the voyage
must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men's courage is proof against
protracted meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night watches, his
officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than Moby Dick. For however eagerly
and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all
sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable—they live in the varying outer weather, and they
inhale its fickleness—and when retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however
promissory of life and passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that temporary interests
and employments should intervene and hold them healthily suspended for the final dash.
Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion mankind disdain all base
considerations; but such times are evanescent. The permanent constitutional condition of the
manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the
hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds a certain
generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they
must also have food for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and chivalric
Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight for their holy
sepulchre, without committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious perquisites by
the way. Had they been strictly held to their one final and romantic object—that final and romantic
object, too many would have turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all
hopes of cash—aye, cash. They may scorn cash now; but let some months go by, and no
perspective promise of it to them, and then this same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them,
this same cash would soon cashier Ahab.
Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more related to Ahab personally.
Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but
private purpose of the Pequod's voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing, he
had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation; and with perfect
impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all
further obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command. From even the barely
hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible consequences of such a suppressed impression
gaining ground, Ahab must of course have been most anxious to protect himself. That protection
could only consist in his own predominating brain and heart and hand, backed by a heedful, closely
calculating attention to every minute atmospheric influence which it was possible for his crew to be
subjected to.
For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be verbally developed here, Ahab
plainly saw that he must still in a good degree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the
Pequod's voyage; observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force himself to evince all
his well known passionate interest in the general pursuit of his profession.
Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the three mast-heads and
admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance
was not long without reward.
 CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.
It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly
gazing over into the lead-coloured waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is
called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet somehow
preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in the air, that each silent
sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self.
I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and
repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for
the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword
between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home
every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea,
only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of
Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay
the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and
that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own.
This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave
my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive, indifferent sword,
sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be;
and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect
of the completed fabric; this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both
warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance—aye, chance, free will, and necessity
—nowise incompatible—all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to
be swerved from its ultimate course—its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that;
free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play
within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus
prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.
Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so strange, long drawn, and
musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up
at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad
Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a wand,
and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very
moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen's look-outs perched
as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived such a
marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian's.
As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly peering towards the
horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by
those wild cries announcing their coming.
"There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!"
"Where-away?"
"On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!"
Instantly all was commotion.
The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And
thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other tribes of his genus.
"There go flukes!" was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales disappeared.
"Quick, steward!" cried Ahab. "Time! time!"
Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact minute to Ahab.
 The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling before it. Tashtego
reporting that the whales had gone down heading to leeward, we confidently looked to see them
again directly in advance of our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale
when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while concealed beneath the
surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the opposite quarter—this deceitfulness of his could
not now be in action; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego had been
in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of the men selected for shipkeepers
—that is, those not appointed to the boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head.
The sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed in their places; the
cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over the sea like
three samphire baskets over high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand
clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale. So look the long line of
man-of-war's men about to throw themselves on board an enemy's ship.
But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took every eye from the whale.
With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed
fresh formed out of air.
 CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.
The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side of the deck, and, with a
noiseless celerity, were casting loose the tackles and bands of the boat which swung there. This
boat had always been deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called the captain's, on
account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The figure that now stood by its bows was tall
and swart, with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese jacket of
black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers of the same dark stuff. But strangely
crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled
round and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of this figure were of that
vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas;—a race
notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners supposed to be
the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-
room they suppose to be elsewhere.
While yet the wondering ship's company were gazing upon these strangers, Ahab cried out to
the white-turbaned old man at their head, "All ready there, Fedallah?"
"Ready," was the half-hissed reply.
"Lower away then; d'ye hear?" shouting across the deck. "Lower away there, I say."
Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their amazement the men sprang over the rail;
the sheaves whirled round in the blocks; with a wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea; while,
with a dexterous, off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the sailors, goat-like, leaped
down the rolling ship's side into the tossed boats below.
Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship's lee, when a fourth keel, coming from the
windward side, pulled round under the stern, and showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who,
standing erect in the stern, loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely,
so as to cover a large expanse of water. But with all their eyes again riveted upon the swart
Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other boats obeyed not the command.
"Captain Ahab?—" said Starbuck.
"Spread yourselves," cried Ahab; "give way, all four boats. Thou, Flask, pull out more to
leeward!"
"Aye, aye, sir," cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his great steering oar. "Lay back!"
addressing his crew. "There!—there!—there again! There she blows right ahead, boys!—lay
back!"
"Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy."
"Oh, I don't mind'em, sir," said Archy; "I knew it all before now. Didn't I hear 'em in the hold? And
didn't I tell Cabaco here of it? What say ye, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask."
"Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little ones," drawlingly and soothingly
sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom still showed signs of uneasiness. "Why don't you break
your backbones, my boys? What is it you stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They are only
five more hands come to help us—never mind from where—the more the merrier. Pull, then, do
pull; never mind the brimstone—devils are good fellows enough. So, so; there you are now; that's
the stroke for a thousand pounds; that's the stroke to sweep the stakes! Hurrah for the gold cup of
sperm oil, my heroes! Three cheers, men—all hearts alive! Easy, easy; don't be in a hurry—don't
be in a hurry. Why don't you snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something, you dogs! So, so, so,
then:—softly, softly! That's it—that's it! long and strong. Give way there, give way! The devil fetch
ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye?
pull, can't ye? pull, won't ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes don't ye pull?—pull
and break something! pull, and start your eyes out! Here!" whipping out the sharp knife from his
girdle; "every mother's son of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between his teeth. That's it
—that's it. Now ye do something; that looks like it, my steel-bits. Start her—start her, my silver-
spoons! Start her, marling-spikes!"
Stubb's exordium to his crew is given here at large, because he had rather a peculiar way of
talking to them in general, and especially in inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not
suppose from this specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions with his
congregation. Not at all; and therein consisted his chief peculiarity. He would say the most terrific
things to his crew, in a tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so
calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such queer invocations without
pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so
easy and indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly gaped—open-
mouthed at times—that the mere sight of such a yawning commander, by sheer force of contrast,
acted like a charm upon the crew. Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists,
whose jollity is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all inferiors on their guard in the
matter of obeying them.
In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely across Stubb's bow; and
when for a minute or so the two boats were pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate.
"Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if ye please!"
"Halloa!" returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he spoke; still earnestly but
whisperingly urging his crew; his face set like a flint from Stubb's.
"What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!
"Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, strong, boys!)" in a whisper to
his crew, then speaking out loud again: "A sad business, Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my
lads!) but never mind, Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, come what will.
(Spring, my men, spring!) There's hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that's what ye came
for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm's the play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand."
"Aye, aye, I thought as much," soliloquized Stubb, when the boats diverged, "as soon as I clapt
eye on 'em, I thought so. Aye, and that's what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy
long suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale's at the bottom of it. Well, well, so
be it! Can't be helped! All right! Give way, men! It ain't the White Whale to-day! Give way!"
Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical instant as the lowering of the
boats from the deck, this had not unreasonably awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in
some of the ship's company; but Archy's fancied discovery having some time previous got abroad
among them, though indeed not credited then, this had in some small measure prepared them for
the event. It took off the extreme edge of their wonder; and so what with all this and Stubb's
confident way of accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed from superstitious
surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room for all manner of wild conjectures as to dark
Ahab's precise agency in the matter from the beginning. For me, I silently recalled the mysterious
shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket dawn, as well as the
enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah.
Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the furthest to windward, was still
ranging ahead of the other boats; a circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him.
Those tiger yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five trip-hammers they
rose and fell with regular strokes of strength, which periodically started the boat along the water
like a horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen pulling
the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and displayed his naked chest with the
whole part of his body above the gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the
watery horizon; while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a fencer's, thrown half
backward into the air, as if to counterbalance any tendency to trip; Ahab was seen steadily
managing his steering oar as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him. All at
once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained fixed, while the boat's five
oars were seen simultaneously peaked. Boat and crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the
three spread boats in the rear paused on their way. The whales had irregularly settled bodily down
into the blue, thus giving no distantly discernible token of the movement, though from his closer
vicinity Ahab had observed it.
"Every man look out along his oars!" cried Starbuck. "Thou, Queequeg, stand up!"
Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage stood erect there, and
with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the spot where the chase had last been descried.
Likewise upon the extreme stern of the boat where it was also triangularly platformed level with the
gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and adroitly balancing himself to the jerking tossings of
his chip of a craft, and silently eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea.
Not very far distant Flask's boat was also lying breathlessly still; its commander recklessly
standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a stout sort of post rooted in the keel, and rising some
two feet above the level of the stern platform. It is used for catching turns with the whale line. Its top
is not more spacious than the palm of a man's hand, and standing upon such a base as that, Flask
seemed perched at the mast-head of some ship which had sunk to all but her trucks. But little
King-Post was small and short, and at the same time little King-Post was full of a large and tall
ambition, so that this loggerhead stand-point of his did by no means satisfy King-Post.
"I can't see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on to that."
Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way, swiftly slid aft, and then
erecting himself volunteered his lofty shoulders for a pedestal.
"Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?"
"That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you fifty feet taller."
Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the boat, the gigantic negro,
stooping a little, presented his flat palm to Flask's foot, and then putting Flask's hand on his
hearse-plumed head and bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one dexterous fling
landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders. And here was Flask now standing, Daggoo
with one lifted arm furnishing him with a breastband to lean against and steady himself by.
At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what wondrous habitude of unconscious
skill the whaleman will maintain an erect posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most
riotously perverse and cross-running seas. Still more strange to see him giddily perched upon the
loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But the sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic
Daggoo was yet more curious; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of,
barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his
broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider.
Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then stamp with
impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby give to the negro's lordly chest. So have I
seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her
tides and her seasons for that.
Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing solicitudes. The whales might
have made one of their regular soundings, not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that were
the case, Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace the languishing
interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his hatband, where he always wore it aslant like a feather.
He loaded it, and rammed home the loading with his thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his
match across the rough sandpaper of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer, whose eyes had
been setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly dropped like light from his erect attitude to
his seat, crying out in a quick phrensy of hurry, "Down, down all, and give way!—there they are!"
To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been visible at that moment;
nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white water, and thin scattered puffs of vapour hovering over
it, and suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white rolling billows. The air
around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron.
Beneath this atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of water, also, the
whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other indications, the puffs of vapour they
spouted, seemed their forerunning couriers and detached flying outriders.
All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled water and air. But it bade fair
to outstrip them; it flew on and on, as a mass of interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream
from the hills.
"Pull, pull, my good boys," said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but intensest concentrated
whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed glance from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow,
almost seemed as two visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much
to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him. Only the silence of the boat was at
intervals startlingly pierced by one of his peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, now soft
with entreaty.
How different the loud little King-Post. "Sing out and say something, my hearties. Roar and pull,
my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I'll sign
over to you my Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys. Lay me on
—lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring mad! See! see that white water!" And so
shouting, he pulled his hat from his head, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted
it far off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the boat's stern like a crazed colt
from the prairie.
"Look at that chap now," philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his unlighted short pipe,
mechanically retained between his teeth, at a short distance, followed after—"He's got fits, that
Flask has. Fits? yes, give him fits—that's the very word—pitch fits into 'em. Merrily, merrily, hearts-
alive. Pudding for supper, you know;—merry's the word. Pull, babes—pull, sucklings—pull, all. But
what the devil are you hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only pull, and keep
pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite your knives in two—that's all. Take it easy
—why don't ye take it easy, I say, and burst all your livers and lungs!"
But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of his—these were words
best omitted here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel
sharks in the audacious seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of
red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.
Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions of Flask to "that whale," as he
called the fictitious monster which he declared to be incessantly tantalizing his boat's bow with its
tail—these allusions of his were at times so vivid and life-like, that they would cause some one or
two of his men to snatch a fearful look over the shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the
oarsmen must put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usage pronouncing that
they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but arms, in these critical moments.
It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging,
hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless
bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like
edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound
dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the
opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the cries of the
headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of
the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her
screaming brood;—all this was thrilling.
Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not
the dead man's ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world;—neither of these
can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself
pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale.
The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and more visible, owing
to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows flung upon the sea. The jets of vapour no
longer blended, but tilted everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes.
The boats were pulled more apart; Starbuck giving chase to three whales running dead to leeward.
Our sail was now set, and, with the still rising wind, we rushed along; the boat going with such
madness through the water, that the lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to escape
being torn from the row-locks.
Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither ship nor boat to be seen.
"Give way, men," whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet of his sail; "there is time
to kill a fish yet before the squall comes. There's white water again!—close to! Spring!"
Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted that the other boats had
got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said:
"Stand up!" and Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.
Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril so close to them ahead,
yet with their eyes on the intense countenance of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew that
the imminent instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing sound as of fifty elephants
stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was still booming through the mist, the waves curling and
hissing around us like the erected crests of enraged serpents.
"That's his hump. THERE, THERE, give it to him!" whispered Starbuck.
A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one
welded commotion came an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on
a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapour shot up near by; something
rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole crew were half suffocated as they
were tossed helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon
had all blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.
Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round it we picked up
the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale, tumbled back to our places. There we sat
up to our knees in the sea, the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing
eyes the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom of the ocean.
The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together; the whole squall
roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we
were burning; immortal in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar to the
live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those boats in that storm. Meanwhile the
driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be
seen. The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were useless as
propellers, performing now the office of life-preservers. So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof
match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it
on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he
sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the
sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.
Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat, we lifted up our eyes as
the dawn came on. The mist still spread over the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom
of the boat. Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear. We all heard a
faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by the storm. The sound came nearer and
nearer; the thick mists were dimly parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the
sea as the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us within a distance of not much
more than its length.
Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant it tossed and gaped
beneath the ship's bows like a chip at the base of a cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it,
and it was seen no more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were dashed
against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely landed on board. Ere the squall came
close to, the other boats had cut loose from their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The
ship had given us up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of our perishing,
—an oar or a lance pole.
 CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man
takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and
more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits,
and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and
persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent
digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects
of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-
natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker.
That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme
tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have
seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is
nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy;
and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.
"Queequeg," said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck, and I was still shaking
myself in my jacket to fling off the water; "Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often
happen?" Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand
that such things did often happen.
"Mr. Stubb," said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his oil-jacket, was now calmly
smoking his pipe in the rain; "Mr. Stubb, I think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever
met, our chief mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose then, that going
plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman's discretion?
"
"Certain. I've lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn."
"Mr. Flask," said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing close by; "you are experienced in
these things, and I am not. Will you tell me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask,
for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death's jaws?"
"Can't you twist that smaller?" said Flask. "Yes, that's the law. I should like to see a boat's crew
backing water up to a whale face foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint,
mind that!"
Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement of the entire case.
Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings in the water and consequent bivouacks on the
deep, were matters of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the superlatively
critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign my life into the hands of him who steered the
boat—oftentimes a fellow who at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of
scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings; considering that the particular disaster to our own
particular boat was chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck's driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of
a squall, and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his great heedfulness in
the fishery; considering that I belonged to this uncommonly prudent Starbuck's boat; and finally
considering in what a devil's chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all things
together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will. "Queequeg,"
said I, "come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee."
It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments,
but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my
nautical life that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon the present
occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should
now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary
clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself; my death and
burial were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost
with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.
Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool,
collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.
 CHAPTER 50. Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
"Who would have thought it, Flask!" cried Stubb; "if I had but one leg you would not catch me in a
boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my timber toe. Oh! he's a wonderful old man!"
"I don't think it so strange, after all, on that account," said Flask. "If his leg were off at the hip,
now, it would be a different thing. That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of
the other left, you know."
"I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel."
Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering the paramount
importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is right for a whaling captain to jeopardize
that life in the active perils of the chase. So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears in their
eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the thickest of the fight.
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that with two legs man is
but a hobbling wight in all times of danger; considering that the pursuit of whales is always under
great and extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then comprises a peril;
under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a
general thing, the joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.
Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of his entering a boat in
certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of
action and giving his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned to
him as a regular headsman in the hunt—above all for Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra
men, as that same boat's crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads
of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat's crew from them, nor had he in
any way hinted his desires on that head. Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own
touching all that matter. Until Cabaco's published discovery, the sailors had little foreseen it, though
to be sure when, after being a little while out of port, all hands had concluded the customary
business of fitting the whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then
found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his own hands for what was thought
to be one of the spare boats, and even solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when
the line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was observed in him,
and particularly his solicitude in having an extra coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to
make it better withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he evinced in
exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called, the horizontal piece in
the boat's bow for bracing the knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was
observed how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the semi-circular
depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter's chisel gouged out a little here and straightened it
a little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. But
almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with
a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his intention to hunt that
mortal monster in person. But such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest suspicion
as to any boat's crew being assigned to that boat.
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away; for in a whaler
wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such unaccountable odds and ends of strange
nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws
of whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing
about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks,
and what not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin to chat
with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle.
But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate phantoms soon found their place
among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah
remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort
of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes; nay, so far
as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even
authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah.
He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their
dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic
communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent—those insulated,
immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the
ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a
distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other
as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end;
when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the
devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.
 CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.
Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four
several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called),
being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality,
southerly from St. Helena.
It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the
waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a
silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the
white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and
glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights, it
was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a look-out there, with the same precision
as if it had been day. And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a
hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions, then, the seamen
beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions
in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights without
uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that
silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted
in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. "There she blows!" Had the trump of judgment blown,
they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a
most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every
soul on board instinctively desired a lowering.
Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t'gallant sails and
royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with
every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving,
lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering
deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences
were struggling in her—one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some
horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab's face that night, you would have thought that in him
also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck,
every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked. But
though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet
the silvery jet was no more seen that night. Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second
time.
This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days after, lo! at the same
silent hour, it was again announced: again it was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake
it, once more it disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after night, till no one
heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case
might be; disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and somehow seeming at
every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and further in our van, this solitary jet seemed
for ever alluring us on.
Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance with the preternaturalness,
as it seemed, which in many things invested the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen
who swore that whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however far apart
latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by one self-same whale; and that whale,
Moby Dick. For a time, there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if
it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn round upon us,
and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas.
These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous potency from the
contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there
lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily,
lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of life
before our urn-like prow.
But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling around us, and we
rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply
bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the
foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place
to sights more dismal than before.
Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick in
our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these
birds were seen; and spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though
they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation, and
therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly
heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in
anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.
Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto, as called of yore; for long
allured by the perfidious silences that before had attended us, we found ourselves launched into
this tormented sea, where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed
condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air without any
horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying; still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still
beckoning us on from before, the solitary jet would at times be descried.
During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the time the almost
continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and
more seldom than ever addressed his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything
above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the issue of
the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists. So, with his ivory leg inserted into its
accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would
stand gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal
his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew driven from the forward part of the ship by the
perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist;
and the better to guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a sort of
bowline secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were
spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through
all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of
humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines;
still wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed demanding repose
he would not seek that repose in his hammock. Never could Starbuck forget the old man's aspect,
when one night going down into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw him with
closed eyes sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair; the rain and half-melted sleet of the storm
from which he had some time before emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and
coat. On the table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and currents which have
previously been spoken of. His lantern swung from his tightly clenched hand. Though the body was
erect, the head was thrown back so that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the
tell-tale that swung from a beam in the ceiling.*
*The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the compass at the helm,
the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the course of the ship.
Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this gale, still thou steadfastly
eyest thy purpose.
 CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.
South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising ground for Right
Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from
my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the
far ocean fisheries—a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.
As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the skeleton of a stranded walrus.
All down her sides, this spectral appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while
all her spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over with hoar-frost. Only
her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-
heads. They seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had
survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and
swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we
six men in the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-
heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as
they passed, said not one word to our own look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard
from below.
"Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?"
But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the act of putting his trumpet
to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain
strove to make himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the distance
between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod were evincing their observance
of this ominous incident at the first mere mention of the White Whale's name to another ship, Ahab
for a moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat to board the
stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking advantage of his windward position, he
again seized his trumpet, and knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer
and shortly bound home, he loudly hailed—"Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the
world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am
not at home, tell them to address them to—"
At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in accordance with their
singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish, that for some days before had been placidly
swimming by our side, darted away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves
fore and aft with the stranger's flanks. Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must
often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles
capriciously carry meanings.
"Swim away from me, do ye?" murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water. There seemed but
little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless sadness than the insane old man
had ever before evinced. But turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship in
the wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion voice,—"Up helm! Keep her off round
the world!"
Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that
circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started,
where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.
Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new
distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King
Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of,
or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human
hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway
leave us whelmed.
 CHAPTER 53. The Gam.
The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the whaler we had spoken was this: the
wind and sea betokened storms. But even had this not been the case, he would not after all,
perhaps, have boarded her—judging by his subsequent conduct on similar occasions—if so it had
been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained a negative answer to the question he put. For,
as it eventually turned out, he cared not to consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger captain,
except he could contribute some of that information he so absorbingly sought. But all this might
remain inadequately estimated, were not something said here of the peculiar usages of whaling-
vessels when meeting each other in foreign seas, and especially on a common cruising-ground.
If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the equally desolate Salisbury
Plain in England; if casually encountering each other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain, for the
life of them, cannot well avoid a mutual salutation; and stopping for a moment to interchange the
news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while and resting in concert: then, how much more natural
that upon the illimitable Pine Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling vessels
descrying each other at the ends of the earth—off lone Fanning's Island, or the far away King's
Mills; how much more natural, I say, that under such circumstances these ships should not only
interchange hails, but come into still closer, more friendly and sociable contact. And especially
would this seem to be a matter of course, in the case of vessels owned in one seaport, and whose
captains, officers, and not a few of the men are personally known to each other; and consequently,
have all sorts of dear domestic things to talk about.
For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters on board; at any rate, she
will be sure to let her have some papers of a date a year or two later than the last one on her
blurred and thumb-worn files. And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound ship would receive
the latest whaling intelligence from the cruising-ground to which she may be destined, a thing of the
utmost importance to her. And in degree, all this will hold true concerning whaling vessels crossing
each other's track on the cruising-ground itself, even though they are equally long absent from
home. For one of them may have received a transfer of letters from some third, and now far
remote vessel; and some of those letters may be for the people of the ship she now meets.
Besides, they would exchange the whaling news, and have an agreeable chat. For not only would
they meet with all the sympathies of sailors, but likewise with all the peculiar congenialities arising
from a common pursuit and mutually shared privations and perils.
Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference; that is, so long as both
parties speak one language, as is the case with Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from
the small number of English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when they do
occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them; for your Englishman is rather
reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides,
the English whalers sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the American whalers;
regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his nondescript provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant.
But where this superiority in the English whalemen does really consist, it would be hard to say,
seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more whales than all the English, collectively, in
ten years. But this is a harmless little foible in the English whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer
does not take much to heart; probably, because he knows that he has a few foibles himself.
So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the whalers have most reason to be
sociable—and they are so. Whereas, some merchant ships crossing each other's wake in the mid-
Atlantic, will oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition, mutually cutting
each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in Broadway; and all the time indulging,
perhaps, in finical criticism upon each other's rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at
sea, they first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such a ducking of ensigns,
that there does not seem to be much right-down hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all.
As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run away from each
other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross each other's cross-
bones, the first hail is—"How many skulls?"—the same way that whalers hail—"How many barrels?
" And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are infernal villains on
both sides, and don't like to see overmuch of each other's villanous likenesses.
But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable, free-and-easy whaler! What
does the whaler do when she meets another whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a
"GAM," a thing so utterly unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the name even; and if
by chance they should hear of it, they only grin at it, and repeat gamesome stuff about "spouters"
and "blubber-boilers," and such like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and
also all Pirates and Man-of-War's men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such a scornful feeling
towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard to answer. Because, in the case of
pirates, say, I should like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It
sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows. And besides, when a
man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I
conclude, that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that assertion the pirate
has no solid basis to stand on.
But what is a GAM? You might wear out your index-finger running up and down the columns of
dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster's
ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in
constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly, it needs a definition, and
should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With that view, let me learnedly define it.
GAM. NOUN—A SOCIAL MEETING OF TWO (OR MORE) WHALESHIPS, GENERALLY ON A
CRUISING-GROUND; WHEN, AFTER EXCHANGING HAILS, THEY EXCHANGE VISITS BY
BOATS' CREWS; THE TWO CAPTAINS REMAINING, FOR THE TIME, ON BOARD OF ONE
SHIP, AND THE TWO CHIEF MATES ON THE OTHER.
There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten here. All professions
have their own little peculiarities of detail; so has the whale fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave
ship, when the captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern sheets on a
comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often steers himself with a pretty little milliner's
tiller decorated with gay cords and ribbons. But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa of that
sort whatever, and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if whaling captains were wheeled about the
water on castors like gouty old aldermen in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never
admits of any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete boat's crew must leave
the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of the number, that subordinate is the
steersman upon the occasion, and the captain, having no place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all
standing like a pine tree. And often you will notice that being conscious of the eyes of the whole
visible world resting on him from the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is all alive to the
importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs. Nor is this any very easy matter; for in
his rear is the immense projecting steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of his back,
the after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus completely wedged before and
behind, and can only expand himself sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a
sudden, violent pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length of foundation is
nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a spread angle of two poles, and you cannot
stand them up. Then, again, it would never do in plain sight of the world's riveted eyes, it would
never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying himself the slightest particle by
catching hold of anything with his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he
generally carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps being generally very large, heavy
hands, he carries them there for ballast. Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well
authenticated ones too, where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical moment or
two, in a sudden squall say—to seize hold of the nearest oarsman's hair, and hold on there like
grim death.
 CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho's Story.
(AS TOLD AT THE GOLDEN INN)
The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is much like some noted
four corners of a great highway, where you meet more travellers than in any other part.
It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homeward-bound whaleman, the
Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was manned almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that
ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White Whale
was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely to
involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments
of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance, with its own
particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be
narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the story
was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private property of three
confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with
Romish injunctions of secrecy, but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed
so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well withhold the rest.
Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came
to the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this
matter, that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod's
main-mast. Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on
the ship, the whole of this strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting record.
*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still used by whalemen in
hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.
For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging
circle of my Spanish friends, one saint's eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden
Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer terms with
me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the
time.
"Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about rehearsing to you,
gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not very
many days' sail eastward from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the
northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to daily usage, it was
observed that she made more water in her hold than common. They supposed a sword-fish had
stabbed her, gentlemen. But the captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good
luck awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit them, and the leak not
being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they could not find it after searching the
hold as low down as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her cruisings, the
mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no good luck came; more days went
by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now
taking some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among the
islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.
"Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance favoured, he did not at
all fear that his ship would founder by the way, because his pumps were of the best, and being
periodically relieved at them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship free; never
mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well nigh the whole of this passage being attended
by very prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port
without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the brutal overbearing of Radney, the
mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado
from Buffalo.
 "'Lakeman!—Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?' said Don Sebastian,
rising in his swinging mat of grass.
"On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but—I crave your courtesy—may be, you shall soon
hear further of all that. Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as
large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far Manilla; this Lakeman, in the
land-locked heart of our America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting
impressions popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, those
grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,
—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its
rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even
as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the
Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the
East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-
like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at
intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their
peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the
gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring
wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors;
they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float
alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech
canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave;
they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full
many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was
wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any. And for
Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at
his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your
contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods
seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a
man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil
indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human
recognition which is the meanest slave's right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained
harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made
mad, and Steelkilt—but, gentlemen, you shall hear.
"It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her prow for her island haven, that
the Town-Ho's leak seemed again increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the
pumps every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our Atlantic, for example,
some skippers think little of pumping their whole way across it; though of a still, sleepy night,
should the officer of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the probability would be that
he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on account of all hands gently subsiding to
the bottom. Nor in the solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it
altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles in full chorus even for a voyage
of considerable length; that is, if it lie along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any other reasonable
retreat is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part of those
waters, some really landless latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little anxious.
"Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found gaining once more,
there was in truth some small concern manifested by several of her company; especially by
Radney the mate. He commanded the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and
every way expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a coward, and as
little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness touching his own person as any fearless,
unthinking creature on land or on sea that you can conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore
when he betrayed this solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the seamen declared that it
was only on account of his being a part owner in her. So when they were working that evening at
the pumps, there was on this head no small gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they
stood with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling clear water; clear as any mountain
spring, gentlemen—that bubbling from the pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself out in
steady spouts at the lee scupper-holes.
"Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours—watery or
otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very
significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives
an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize
that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may,
gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman, and a
flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy's snorting charger; and a brain,
and a heart, and a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been
born son to Charlemagne's father. But Radney, the mate, was ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as
stubborn, as malicious. He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.
"Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the rest, the Lakeman
affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with his gay banterings.
"'Aye, aye, my merry lads, it's a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one of ye, and let's have a taste.
By the Lord, it's worth bottling! I tell ye what, men, old Rad's investment must go for it! he had best
cut away his part of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that sword-fish only began the job;
he's come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the
whole posse of 'em are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom; making
improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I'd tell him to jump overboard and scatter 'em.
They're playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him. But he's a simple old soul,—Rad, and a
beauty too. Boys, they say the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I wonder if he'd
give a poor devil like me the model of his nose.'
"'Damn your eyes! what's that pump stopping for?' roared Radney, pretending not to have heard
the sailors' talk. 'Thunder away at it!'
"'Aye, aye, sir,' said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. 'Lively, boys, lively, now!' And with that the pump
clanged like fifty fire-engines; the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping
of the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life's utmost energies.
"Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went forward all panting, and
sat himself down on the windlass; his face fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse
sweat from his brow. Now what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney to
meddle with such a man in that corporeally exasperated state, I know not; but so it happened.
Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the
planks, and also a shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent upon allowing a pig to
run at large.
"Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship's deck at sea is a piece of household work which in all times
but raging gales is regularly attended to every evening; it has been known to be done in the case
of ships actually foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the
instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first
washing their faces. But in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys,
if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho that had been divided
into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had
been regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should have been freed
from any trivial business not connected with truly nautical duties, such being the case with his
comrades. I mention all these particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair stood
between the two men.
"But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost as plainly meant to sting
and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a
whale-ship will understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully
comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat still for a moment, and as he
steadfastly looked into the mate's malignant eye and perceived the stacks of powder-casks
heaped up in him and the slow-match silently burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw
all this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper passionateness in any
already ireful being—a repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by really valiant men even when
aggrieved—this nameless phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.
"Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily exhaustion he was temporarily
in, he answered him saying that sweeping the deck was not his business, and he would not do it.
And then, without at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads as the customary sweepers;
who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done little or nothing all day. To this, Radney replied with
an oath, in a most domineering and outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his command;
meanwhile advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an uplifted cooper's club hammer which
he had snatched from a cask near by.
"Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for all his first nameless
feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt could but ill brook this bearing in the mate; but
somehow still smothering the conflagration within him, without speaking he remained doggedly
rooted to his seat, till at last the incensed Radney shook the hammer within a few inches of his
face, furiously commanding him to do his bidding.
"Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily followed by the mate with his
menacing hammer, deliberately repeated his intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his
forbearance had not the slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable intimation with his twisted
hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man; but it was to no purpose. And in this way the
two went once slowly round the windlass; when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him
that he had now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the Lakeman paused on the
hatches and thus spoke to the officer:
"'Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to yourself.' But the
predestinated mate coming still closer to him, where the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the
heavy hammer within an inch of his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insufferable
maledictions. Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye with the
unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching his right hand behind him and creepingly
drawing it back, told his persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would
murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter by the gods. Immediately
the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant the lower jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he
fell on the hatch spouting blood like a whale.
"Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays leading far aloft to where
two of his comrades were standing their mastheads. They were both Canallers.
"'Canallers!' cried Don Pedro. 'We have seen many whale-ships in our harbours, but never
heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what are they?'
"'Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You must have heard of it.'
"'Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary land, we know but little of
your vigorous North.'
"'Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha's very fine; and ere proceeding further I will tell
ye what our Canallers are; for such information may throw side-light upon my story.'
"For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire breadth of the state of New
York; through numerous populous cities and most thriving villages; through long, dismal,
uninhabited swamps, and affluent, cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room and bar-
room; through the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman arches over Indian rivers; through sun
and shade; by happy hearts or broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble
Mohawk counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires stand almost like
milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and often lawless life. There's your
true Ashantee, gentlemen; there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you;
under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronising lee of churches. For by some curious
fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls
of justice, so sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities.
"'Is that a friar passing?' said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the crowded plazza, with
humorous concern.
"'Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella's Inquisition wanes in Lima,' laughed Don
Sebastian. 'Proceed, Senor.'
"'A moment! Pardon!' cried another of the company. 'In the name of all us Limeese, I but desire
to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting
present Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow and look surprised;
you know the proverb all along this coast—"Corrupt as Lima." It but bears out your saying, too;
churches more plentiful than billiard-tables, and for ever open—and "Corrupt as Lima." So, too,
Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St. Mark!—St. Dominic, purge it!
Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, you pour out again.'
"Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would make a fine dramatic hero,
so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his
green-turfed, flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra,
ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed. The
brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat
betoken his grand features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats;
his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on his own
canal, I have received good turns from one of these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be
not ungrateful; but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your man of violence, that at
times he has as stiff an arm to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one. In sum,
gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is, is emphatically evinced by this; that our wild
whale-fishery contains so many of its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of
mankind, except Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does it at all
diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our rural boys and young men
born along its line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition between
quietly reaping in a Christian corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric
seas.
"'I see! I see!' impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha upon his silvery ruffles. 'No
need to travel! The world's one Lima. I had thought, now, that at your temperate North the
generations were cold and holy as the hills.—But the story.'
"I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly had he done so, when he
was surrounded by the three junior mates and the four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the
deck. But sliding down the ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into the uproar, and
sought to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle. Others of the sailors joined with them in
this attempt, and a twisted turmoil ensued; while standing out of harm's way, the valiant captain
danced up and down with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious
scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck. At intervals, he ran close up to the revolving
border of the confusion, and prying into the heart of it with his pike, sought to prick out the object of
his resentment. But Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all; they succeeded in
gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing about three or four large casks in a line with the
windlass, these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves behind the barricade.
"'Come out of that, ye pirates!' roared the captain, now menacing them with a pistol in each
hand, just brought to him by the steward. 'Come out of that, ye cut-throats!'
"Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there, defied the worst the pistols
could do; but gave the captain to understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt's) death would be the
signal for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands. Fearing in his heart lest this might prove but
too true, the captain a little desisted, but still commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their
duty.
 "'Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?' demanded their ringleader.
"'Turn to! turn to!—I make no promise;—to your duty! Do you want to sink the ship, by knocking
off at a time like this? Turn to!' and he once more raised a pistol.
"'Sink the ship?' cried Steelkilt. 'Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us turns to, unless you swear not
to raise a rope-yarn against us. What say ye, men?' turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was
their response.
"The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his eye on the Captain, and
jerking out such sentences as these:—'It's not our fault; we didn't want it; I told him to take his
hammer away; it was boy's business; he might have known me before this; I told him not to prick
the buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here against his cursed jaw; ain't those mincing knives
down in the forecastle there, men? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God, look
to yourself; say the word; don't be a fool; forget it all; we are ready to turn to; treat us decently, and
we're your men; but we won't be flogged.'
"'Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!'
"'Look ye, now,' cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him, 'there are a few of us here
(and I am one of them) who have shipped for the cruise, d'ye see; now as you well know, sir, we
can claim our discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don't want a row; it's not our
interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we won't be flogged.'
"'Turn to!' roared the Captain.
"Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:—'I tell you what it is now, Captain, rather
than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby rascal, we won't lift a hand against ye unless ye attack
us; but till you say the word about not flogging us, we don't do a hand's turn.'
"'Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I'll keep ye there till ye're sick of it. Down ye go.'
"'Shall we?' cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against it; but at length, in
obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down into their dark den, growlingly disappearing, like
bears into a cave.
"As the Lakeman's bare head was just level with the planks, the Captain and his posse leaped
the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the slide of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon
it, and loudly called for the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock belonging to the
companionway.
"Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered something down the crack, closed it, and
turned the key upon them—ten in number—leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had
remained neutral.
"All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward and aft, especially about the
forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway; at which last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge,
after breaking through the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed in peace; the men
who still remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps, whose clinking and clanking at intervals
through the dreary night dismally resounded through the ship.
"At sunrise the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck, summoned the prisoners to
work; but with a yell they refused. Water was then lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls
of biscuit were tossed after it; when again turning the key upon them and pocketing it, the Captain
returned to the quarter-deck. Twice every day for three days this was repeated; but on the fourth
morning a confused wrangling, and then a scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was
delivered; and suddenly four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to.
The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps to some fears of ultimate
retribution, had constrained them to surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain
reiterated his demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to stop his babbling
and betake himself where he belonged. On the fifth morning three others of the mutineers bolted
up into the air from the desperate arms below that sought to restrain them. Only three were left.
"'Better turn to, now?' said the Captain with a heartless jeer.
"'Shut us up again, will ye!' cried Steelkilt.
"'Oh certainly,' the Captain, and the key clicked.
"It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of seven of his former associates,
and stung by the mocking voice that had last hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in
a place as black as the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two Canallers,
thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of their hole at the next summoning of the
garrison; and armed with their keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a
handle at each end) run amuck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any devilishness of
desperation possible, seize the ship. For himself, he would do this, he said, whether they joined
him or not. That was the last night he should spend in that den. But the scheme met with no
opposition on the part of the other two; they swore they were ready for that, or for any other mad
thing, for anything in short but a surrender. And what was more, they each insisted upon being the
first man on deck, when the time to make the rush should come. But to this their leader as fiercely
objected, reserving that priority for himself; particularly as his two comrades would not yield, the
one to the other, in the matter; and both of them could not be first, for the ladder would but admit
one man at a time. And here, gentlemen, the foul play of these miscreants must come out.
"Upon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own separate soul had suddenly
lighted, it would seem, upon the same piece of treachery, namely: to be foremost in breaking out,
in order to be the first of the three, though the last of the ten, to surrender; and thereby secure
whatever small chance of pardon such conduct might merit. But when Steelkilt made known his
determination still to lead them to the last, they in some way, by some subtle chemistry of villany,
mixed their before secret treacheries together; and when their leader fell into a doze, verbally
opened their souls to each other in three sentences; and bound the sleeper with cords, and
gagged him with cords; and shrieked out for the Captain at midnight.
"Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood, he and all his armed mates and
harpooneers rushed for the forecastle. In a few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand
and foot, the still struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his perfidious allies, who at
once claimed the honour of securing a man who had been fully ripe for murder. But all these were
collared, and dragged along the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized up into the
mizzen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and there they hung till morning. 'Damn ye,' cried the
Captain, pacing to and fro before them, 'the vultures would not touch ye, ye villains!'
"At sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled from those who had
taken no part in the mutiny, he told the former that he had a good mind to flog them all round
—thought, upon the whole, he would do so—he ought to—justice demanded it; but for the present,
considering their timely surrender, he would let them go with a reprimand, which he accordingly
administered in the vernacular.
"'But as for you, ye carrion rogues,' turning to the three men in the rigging—'for you, I mean to
mince ye up for the try-pots;' and, seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of the
two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their heads sideways, as the two crucified
thieves are drawn.
"'My wrist is sprained with ye!' he cried, at last; 'but there is still rope enough left for you, my fine
bantam, that wouldn't give up. Take that gag from his mouth, and let us hear what he can say for
himself.'
"For a moment the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous motion of his cramped jaws, and then
painfully twisting round his head, said in a sort of hiss, 'What I say is this—and mind it well—if you
flog me, I murder you!'
 "'Say ye so? then see how ye frighten me'—and the Captain drew off with the rope to strike.
"'Best not,' hissed the Lakeman.
"'But I must,'—and the rope was once more drawn back for the stroke.
"Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the Captain; who, to the amazement of
all hands, started back, paced the deck rapidly two or three times, and then suddenly throwing
down his rope, said, 'I won't do it—let him go—cut him down: d'ye hear?'
"But as the junior mates were hurrying to execute the order, a pale man, with a bandaged head,
arrested them—Radney the chief mate. Ever since the blow, he had lain in his berth; but that
morning, hearing the tumult on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had watched the whole
scene. Such was the state of his mouth, that he could hardly speak; but mumbling something about
his being willing and able to do what the captain dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and
advanced to his pinioned foe.
"'You are a coward!' hissed the Lakeman.
"'So I am, but take that.' The mate was in the very act of striking, when another hiss stayed his
uplifted arm. He paused: and then pausing no more, made good his word, spite of Steelkilt's
threat, whatever that might have been. The three men were then cut down, all hands were turned to,
and, sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the iron pumps clanged as before.
"Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired below, a clamor was heard in the
forecastle; and the two trembling traitors running up, besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not
consort with the crew. Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, so at their own
instance they were put down in the ship's run for salvation. Still, no sign of mutiny reappeared
among the rest. On the contrary, it seemed, that mainly at Steelkilt's instigation, they had resolved
to maintain the strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the last, and, when the ship reached port,
desert her in a body. But in order to insure the speediest end to the voyage, they all agreed to
another thing—namely, not to sing out for whales, in case any should be discovered. For, spite of
her leak, and spite of all her other perils, the Town-Ho still maintained her mast-heads, and her
captain was just as willing to lower for a fish that moment, as on the day his craft first struck the
cruising ground; and Radney the mate was quite as ready to change his berth for a boat, and with
his bandaged mouth seek to gag in death the vital jaw of the whale.
"But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of passiveness in their
conduct, he kept his own counsel (at least till all was over) concerning his own proper and private
revenge upon the man who had stung him in the ventricles of his heart. He was in Radney the chief
mate's watch; and as if the infatuated man sought to run more than half way to meet his doom,
after the scene at the rigging, he insisted, against the express counsel of the captain, upon
resuming the head of his watch at night. Upon this, and one or two other circumstances, Steelkilt
systematically built the plan of his revenge.
"During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the bulwarks of the quarter-
deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of the boat which was hoisted up there, a little above
the ship's side. In this attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a considerable
vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down between this was the sea. Steelkilt calculated
his time, and found that his next trick at the helm would come round at two o'clock, in the morning
of the third day from that in which he had been betrayed. At his leisure, he employed the interval in
braiding something very carefully in his watches below.
"'What are you making there?' said a shipmate.
"'What do you think? what does it look like?'
"'Like a lanyard for your bag; but it's an odd one, seems to me.'
"'Yes, rather oddish,' said the Lakeman, holding it at arm's length before him; 'but I think it will
answer. Shipmate, I haven't enough twine,—have you any?'
 "But there was none in the forecastle.
"'Then I must get some from old Rad;' and he rose to go aft.
"'You don't mean to go a begging to HIM!' said a sailor.
"'Why not? Do you think he won't do me a turn, when it's to help himself in the end, shipmate?'
and going to the mate, he looked at him quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend his
hammock. It was given him—neither twine nor lanyard were seen again; but the next night an iron
ball, closely netted, partly rolled from the pocket of the Lakeman's monkey jacket, as he was
tucking the coat into his hammock for a pillow. Twenty-four hours after, his trick at the silent helm
—nigh to the man who was apt to doze over the grave always ready dug to the seaman's hand
—that fatal hour was then to come; and in the fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already
stark and stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in.
"But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody deed he had planned. Yet
complete revenge he had, and without being the avenger. For by a mysterious fatality, Heaven
itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he would have
done.
"It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second day, when they were
washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man, drawing water in the main-chains, all at once
shouted out, 'There she rolls! there she rolls!' Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick.
"'Moby Dick!' cried Don Sebastian; 'St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do whales have christenings?
Whom call you Moby Dick?'
"'A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;—but that would be too long
a story.'
"'How? how?' cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.
"'Nay, Dons, Dons—nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more into the air, Sirs.'
"'The chicha! the chicha!' cried Don Pedro; 'our vigorous friend looks faint;—fill up his empty
glass!'
"No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.—Now, gentlemen, so suddenly perceiving
the snowy whale within fifty yards of the ship—forgetful of the compact among the crew—in the
excitement of the moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily lifted his voice for
the monster, though for some little time past it had been plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-
heads. All was now a phrensy. 'The White Whale—the White Whale!' was the cry from captain,
mates, and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumours, were all anxious to capture so
famous and precious a fish; while the dogged crew eyed askance, and with curses, the appalling
beauty of the vast milky mass, that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like a
living opal in the blue morning sea. Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career of
these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted. The mutineer was the
bowsman of the mate, and when fast to a fish, it was his duty to sit next him, while Radney stood up
with his lance in the prow, and haul in or slacken the line, at the word of command. Moreover, when
the four boats were lowered, the mate's got the start; and none howled more fiercely with delight
than did Steelkilt, as he strained at his oar. After a stiff pull, their harpooneer got fast, and, spear in
hand, Radney sprang to the bow. He was always a furious man, it seems, in a boat. And now his
bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale's topmost back. Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled
him up and up, through a blinding foam that blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the
boat struck as against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing mate. That
instant, as he fell on the whale's slippery back, the boat righted, and was dashed aside by the
swell, while Radney was tossed over into the sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out
through the spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking to remove
himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the
swimmer between his jaws; and rearing high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went down.
"Meantime, at the first tap of the boat's bottom, the Lakeman had slackened the line, so as to
drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a sudden,
terrific, downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line. He cut it; and the whale
was free. But, at some distance, Moby Dick rose again, with some tatters of Radney's red woollen
shirt, caught in the teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but the whale
eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared.
"In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port—a savage, solitary place—where no civilized
creature resided. There, headed by the Lakeman, all but five or six of the foremastmen deliberately
deserted among the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large double war-canoe of the
savages, and setting sail for some other harbor.
"The ship's company being reduced to but a handful, the captain called upon the Islanders to
assist him in the laborious business of heaving down the ship to stop the leak. But to such
unresting vigilance over their dangerous allies was this small band of whites necessitated, both by
night and by day, and so extreme was the hard work they underwent, that upon the vessel being
ready again for sea, they were in such a weakened condition that the captain durst not put off with
them in so heavy a vessel. After taking counsel with his officers, he anchored the ship as far off
shore as possible; loaded and ran out his two cannon from the bows; stacked his muskets on the
poop; and warning the Islanders not to approach the ship at their peril, took one man with him, and
setting the sail of his best whale-boat, steered straight before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred miles
distant, to procure a reinforcement to his crew.
"On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed to have touched at a
low isle of corals. He steered away from it; but the savage craft bore down on him; and soon the
voice of Steelkilt hailed him to heave to, or he would run him under water. The captain presented a
pistol. With one foot on each prow of the yoked war-canoes, the Lakeman laughed him to scorn;
assuring him that if the pistol so much as clicked in the lock, he would bury him in bubbles and
foam.
"'What do you want of me?' cried the captain.
"'Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?' demanded Steelkilt; 'no lies.'
"'I am bound to Tahiti for more men.'
"'Very good. Let me board you a moment—I come in peace.' With that he leaped from the
canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale, stood face to face with the captain.
"'Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me. As soon as Steelkilt leaves
me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder island, and remain there six days. If I do not, may lightning
strike me!'
"'A pretty scholar,' laughed the Lakeman. 'Adios, Senor!' and leaping into the sea, he swam
back to his comrades.
"Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the roots of the cocoa-nut trees,
Steelkilt made sail again, and in due time arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination. There,
luck befriended him; two ships were about to sail for France, and were providentially in want of
precisely that number of men which the sailor headed. They embarked; and so for ever got the
start of their former captain, had he been at all minded to work them legal retribution.
"Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived, and the captain was
forced to enlist some of the more civilized Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea.
Chartering a small native schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all right there,
again resumed his cruisings.
"Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of Nantucket, the widow of
Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white
whale that destroyed him.
"'Are you through?' said Don Sebastian, quietly.
"'I am, Don.'
"'Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions, this your story is in substance
really true? It is so passing wonderful! Did you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me
if I seem to press.'
"'Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don Sebastian's suit,' cried the company,
with exceeding interest.
"'Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentlemen?'
"'Nay,' said Don Sebastian; 'but I know a worthy priest near by, who will quickly procure one for
me. I go for it; but are you well advised? this may grow too serious.'
"'Will you be so good as to bring the priest also, Don?'
"'Though there are no Auto-da-Fe's in Lima now,' said one of the company to another; 'I fear our
sailor friend runs risk of the archiepiscopacy. Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight. I see no
need of this.'
"'Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg that you will be particular in
procuring the largest sized Evangelists you can.'
"'This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,' said Don Sebastian, gravely, returning with a
tall and solemn figure.
"'Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the light, and hold the Holy Book
before me that I may touch it.
"'So help me Heaven, and on my honour the story I have told ye, gentlemen, is in substance and
its great items, true. I know it to be true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I
have seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.'"
 CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the
whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale
is moored alongside the whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there. It may be worth
while, therefore, previously to advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down
to the present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the world right in
this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong.
It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will be found among the oldest
Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times
when on the marble panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields, medallions,
cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of chain-armor like Saladin's, and a helmeted
head like St. George's; ever since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not
only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific presentations of him.
Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale's, is to be
found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta, in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the
almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every
conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came into being.
No wonder then, that in some sort our noble profession of whaling should have been there
shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall,
depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse Avatar.
But though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that
small section of him is all wrong. It looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad
palms of the true whale's majestic flukes.
But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter's portrait of this fish; for he
succeeds no better than the antediluvian Hindoo. It is Guido's picture of Perseus rescuing
Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange
creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his own "Perseus Descending,"
make out one whit better. The huge corpulence of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the
surface, scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its back, and its distended
tusked mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be taken for the Traitors' Gate leading from
the Thames by water into the Tower. Then, there are the Prodromus whales of old Scotch Sibbald,
and Jonah's whale, as depicted in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers. What shall
be said of these? As for the book-binder's whale winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a
descending anchor—as stamped and gilded on the backs and title-pages of many books both old
and new—that is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like
figures on antique vases. Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this book-
binder's fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended when the device was first
introduced. It was introduced by an old Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th century, during
the Revival of Learning; and in those days, and even down to a comparatively late period, dolphins
were popularly supposed to be a species of the Leviathan.
In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will at times meet with very
curious touches at the whale, where all manner of spouts, jets d'eau, hot springs and cold,
Saratoga and Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the
original edition of the "Advancement of Learning" you will find some curious whales.
But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those pictures of leviathan
purporting to be sober, scientific delineations, by those who know. In old Harris's collection of
voyages there are some plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671,
entitled "A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson of
Friesland, master." In one of those plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying
among ice-isles, with white bears running over their living backs. In another plate, the prodigious
blunder is made of representing the whale with perpendicular flukes.
Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett, a Post Captain in the
English navy, entitled "A Voyage round Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of
extending the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries." In this book is an outline purporting to be a "Picture of
a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the coast of Mexico, August,
1793, and hoisted on deck." I doubt not the captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit
of his marines. To mention but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which applied,
according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm whale, would make the eye of that
whale a bow-window some five feet long. Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not give us Jonah
looking out of that eye!
Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the benefit of the young and
tender, free from the same heinousness of mistake. Look at that popular work "Goldsmith's
Animated Nature." In the abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged "whale"
and a "narwhale." I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly whale looks much like an
amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this
nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent public of
schoolboys.
Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacepede, a great naturalist, published a
scientific systemized whale book, wherein are several pictures of the different species of the
Leviathan. All these are not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland whale
(that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a long experienced man as touching that species,
declares not to have its counterpart in nature.
But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was reserved for the scientific
Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales,
in which he gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that picture to any
Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick
Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had the benefit of
a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but whence he derived that picture, who can tell?
Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his
authentic abortions; that is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort of lively lads with the pencil
those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.
As for the sign-painters' whales seen in the streets hanging over the shops of oil-dealers, what
shall be said of them? They are generally Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and very
savage; breakfasting on three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners: their
deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint.
But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all. Consider!
Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as
correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent the noble
animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though elephants have stood for their full-
lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale, in
his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the
vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a
thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his
mighty swells and undulations. And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour
between a young sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one
of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like,
limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.
But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale, accurate hints may be
derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one of the more curious things about this
Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham's
skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the
idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading personal
characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan's articulated bones. In
fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully
invested and padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it.
This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part of this book will be incidentally
shown. It is also very curiously displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer
to the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers, the
index, middle, ring, and little finger. But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as
the human fingers in an artificial covering. "However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve
us," said humorous Stubb one day, "he can never be truly said to handle us without mittens."
For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great
Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one
portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable
degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks
like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by
going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by
him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this
Leviathan.
 CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales,
and the True
Pictures of Whaling Scenes.
In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly tempted here to enter upon
those still more monstrous stories of them which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and
modern, especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass that matter by.
I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale; Colnett's, Huggins's, Frederick
Cuvier's, and Beale's. In the previous chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins's
is far better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale's is the best. All Beale's drawings of this whale
are good, excepting the middle figure in the picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping
his second chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt calculated to
excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is admirably correct and life-like in its general
effect. Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour; but
they are wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault though.
Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they are drawn on too small a
scale to convey a desirable impression. He has but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a
sad deficiency, because it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you can derive
anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his living hunters.
But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details not the most correct,
presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be anywhere found, are two large French
engravings, well executed, and taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent
attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble Sperm Whale is depicted in
full majesty of might, just risen beneath the boat from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing
high in the air upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of the boat is partially
unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the monster's spine; and standing in that prow, for that
one single incomputable flash of time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the incensed
boiling spout of the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if from a precipice. The action of the whole
thing is wonderfully good and true. The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea; the
wooden poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the swimming crew are
scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions of affright; while in the black stormy distance
the ship is bearing down upon the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details
of this whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I could not draw so good a one.
In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside the barnacled flank of a
large running Right Whale, that rolls his black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide
from the Patagonian cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so that from so abounding a
smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave supper cooking in the great bowels
below. Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni,
which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while the thick-lipped
leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds in his wake, and
causing the slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean
steamer. Thus, the foreground is all raging commotion; but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is
the glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the
inert mass of a dead whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the
whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole.
Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he was either practically
conversant with his subject, or else marvellously tutored by some experienced whaleman. The
French are the lads for painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe, and where
will you find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at
Versailles; where the beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of
France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the successive armed kings
and Emperors dash by, like a charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that
gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of Garnery.
The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of things seems to be
peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings they have of their whaling scenes. With not
one tenth of England's experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of the
Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only finished sketches at all
capable of conveying the real spirit of the whale hunt. For the most part, the English and American
whale draughtsmen seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline of things, such as
the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as picturesqueness of effect is concerned, is about
tantamount to sketching the profile of a pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right
whaleman, after giving us a stiff full length of the Greenland whale, and three or four delicate
miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats us to a series of classical engravings of boat
hooks, chopping knives, and grapnels; and with the microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck
submits to the inspection of a shivering world ninety-six fac-similes of magnified Arctic snow
crystals. I mean no disparagement to the excellent voyager (I honour him for a veteran), but in so
important a matter it was certainly an oversight not to have procured for every crystal a sworn
affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of the Peace.
In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other French engravings worthy
of note, by some one who subscribes himself "H. Durand." One of them, though not precisely
adapted to our present purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts. It is a quiet
noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler anchored, inshore, in a calm, and lazily
taking water on board; the loosened sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the
background, both drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is very fine, when considered
with reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen under one of their few aspects of oriental
repose. The other engraving is quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in
the very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the vessel (in the act of cutting-
in) hove over to the monster as if to a quay; and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of
activity, is about giving chase to whales in the distance. The harpoons and lances lie levelled for
use; three oarsmen are just setting the mast in its hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the little
craft stands half-erect out of the water, like a rearing horse. From the ship, the smoke of the
torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke over a village of smithies; and to
windward, a black cloud, rising up with earnest of squalls and rains, seems to quicken the activity
of the excited seamen.
 CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in
Sheet-Iron; in
Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.
On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or
KEDGER, as the sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing the tragic scene in
which he lost his leg. There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed to
contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost
whale. Any time these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that
stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now come. His three whales are
as good whales as were ever published in Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable
a stump as any you will find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump,
never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, stands ruefully
contemplating his own amputation.
Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor, you will come
across lively sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on
Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and other like
skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little ingenious contrivances they
elaborately carve out of the rough material, in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little
boxes of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the skrimshandering business. But,
in general, they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor,
they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a mariner's fancy.
Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which
God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an
Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at
any moment to rebel against him.
Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is his wonderful
patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and
elaboration of carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but
a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been
achieved; and it has cost steady years of steady application.
As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the same marvellous
patience, and with the same single shark's tooth, of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit
of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as the
Greek savage, Achilles's shield; and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that
fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer.
Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea war-
wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles of American whalers. Some of them are done with
much accuracy.
At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung by the tail for knockers
to the road-side door. When the porter is sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these
knocking whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some old-fashioned
churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weather-cocks; but they are so elevated,
and besides that are to all intents and purposes so labelled with "HANDS OFF!" you cannot
examine them closely enough to decide upon their merit.
In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken cliffs masses of rock lie
strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified
forms of the Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in a surf
of green surges.
of green surges.
Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually girdled by
amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky point of view you will catch passing
glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough
whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you wish to return to such a sight again, you
must be sure and take the exact intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else so
chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your precise, previous stand-point would require
a laborious re-discovery; like the Soloma Islands, which still remain incognita, though once high-
ruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them.
Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out great whales in the starry
heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations
saw armies locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round
and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me. And
beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against
the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.
With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount
that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless
tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!
 CHAPTER 58. Brit.
Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute,
yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated
round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.
On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the attack of a
Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly swam through the brit, which, adhering to
the fringing fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated
from the water that escaped at the lip.
As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the
long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting
sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.*
*That part of the sea known among whalemen as the "Brazil Banks" does not bear that name as
the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there being shallows and soundings there, but
because of this remarkable meadow-like appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit continually
floating in those latitudes, where the Right Whale is often chased.
But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all reminded one of mowers.
Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they paused and were stationary for a while, their vast
black forms looked more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in the great
hunting countries of India, the stranger at a distance will sometimes pass on the plains recumbent
elephants without knowing them to be such, taking them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil;
even so, often, with him, who for the first time beholds this species of the leviathans of the sea. And
even when recognised at last, their immense magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that
such bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with the same sort of life that
lives in a dog or a horse.
Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the deep with the same
feelings that you do those of the shore. For though some old naturalists have maintained that all
creatures of the land are of their kind in the sea; and though taking a broad general view of the
thing, this may very well be; yet coming to specialties, where, for example, does the ocean furnish
any fish that in disposition answers to the sagacious kindness of the dog? The accursed shark
alone can in any generic respect be said to bear comparative analogy to him.
But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever been regarded
with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting
terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one
superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have
immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have
gone upon the waters; though but a moment's consideration will teach, that however baby man may
brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may
augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and
pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of
these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally
belongs to it.
The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese vengeance had whelmed a
whole world without leaving so much as a widow. That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean
destroyed the wrecked ships of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided;
two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a miracle upon the other?
Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews, when under the feet of Korah and his company the
live ground opened and swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in
precisely the same manner the live sea swallows up ships and crews.
But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own off-
spring; worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which
itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the
sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with
the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a
mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water,
unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.
Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the
dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal
cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the
world began.
Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both,
the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this
appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of
peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not
off from that isle, thou canst never return!
 CHAPTER 59. Squid.
Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her way north-eastward
towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her
three tall tapering masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a plain. And
still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely, alluring jet would be seen.
But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea,
however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters
seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secrecy; when the slippered waves
whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange
spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.
In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and higher, and disentangling
itself from the azure, at last gleamed before our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus
glistening for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose, and silently
gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick? thought Daggoo. Again the phantom
went down, but on re-appearing once more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man from his
nod, the negro yelled out—"There! there again! there she breaches! right ahead! The White
Whale, the White Whale!"
Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the bees rush to the
boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far
behind in readiness to wave his orders to the helmsman, cast his eager glance in the direction
indicated aloft by the outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo.
Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had gradually worked upon Ahab,
so that he was now prepared to connect the ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the
particular whale he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed him; whichever
way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly perceive the white mass, than with a quick
intensity he instantly gave orders for lowering.
The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab's in advance, and all swiftly pulling towards their
prey. Soon it went down, and while, with oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo!
in the same spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for the moment all
thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas
have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing
cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling
and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No
perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but
undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.
As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated
waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed—"Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and
fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!"
"What was it, Sir?" said Flask.
"The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to
tell of it."
But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel; the rest as silently
following.
Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with the sight of this
object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to
invest it with portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them declare it to be
the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few of them have any but the most vague ideas
concerning its true nature and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale
his only food. For though other species of whales find their food above water, and may be seen by
man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below
the surface; and only by inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that food consists. At
times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what are supposed to be the detached arms of the
squid; some of them thus exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They fancy that the
monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to the bed of the ocean; and that
the sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.
There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop Pontoppodan may
ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in which the Bishop describes it, as alternately
rising and sinking, with some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two correspond. But much
abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he assigns it.
By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious creature, here spoken of,
it is included among the class of cuttle-fish, to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would
seem to belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe.
 CHAPTER 60. The Line.
With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as for the better
understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented, I have here to speak of the magical,
sometimes horrible whale-line.
The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly vapoured with tar, not
impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the
hemp more pliable to the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to the
sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary quantity too much stiffen the whale-line
for the close coiling to which it must be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar
in general by no means adds to the rope's durability or strength, however much it may give it
compactness and gloss.
Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a
material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and
elastic; and I will add (since there is an aesthetics in all things), is much more handsome and
becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a
golden-haired Circassian to behold.
The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight, you would not think it so
strong as it really is. By experiment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one
hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal to three tons. In
length, the common sperm whale-line measures something over two hundred fathoms. Towards the
stern of the boat it is spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so
as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded "sheaves," or layers of concentric
spiralizations, without any hollow but the "heart," or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the
cheese. As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody's
arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub. Some
harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft and
then reeving it downwards through a block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from
all possible wrinkles and twists.
In the English boats two tubs are used instead of one; the same line being continuously coiled in
both tubs. There is some advantage in this; because these twin-tubs being so small they fit more
readily into the boat, and do not strain it so much; whereas, the American tub, nearly three feet in
diameter and of proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky freight for a craft whose planks are but
one half-inch in thickness; for the bottom of the whale-boat is like critical ice, which will bear up a
considerable distributed weight, but not very much of a concentrated one. When the painted
canvas cover is clapped on the American line-tub, the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a
prodigious great wedding-cake to present to the whales.
Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an eye-splice or loop coming up
from the bottom against the side of the tub, and hanging over its edge completely disengaged
from everything. This arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. First: In order to
facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale
should sound so deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line originally attached to the harpoon. In
these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug of ale, as it were, from the one boat to
the other; though the first boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second: This
arrangement is indispensable for common safety's sake; for were the lower end of the line in any
way attached to the boat, and were the whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single,
smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would
infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea; and in that case no town-crier
would ever find her again.
Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is taken aft from the tub, and
passing round the loggerhead there, is again carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting
crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man's oar, so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing;
and also passing between the men, as they alternately sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded
chocks or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size
of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs in a slight festoon over
the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-
line) being coiled upon the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a little further aft,
and is then attached to the short-warp—the rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon;
but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too tedious to
detail.
Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in
almost every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid
eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest snakes sportively festooning
their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen
intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any unknown instant the
harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he
cannot be thus circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones to quiver
in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit—strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?—Gayer sallies,
more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than
you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus hung in hangman's
nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men composing the crew
pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you may say.
Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for those repeated whaling disasters
—some few of which are casually chronicled—of this man or that man being taken out of the boat
by the line, and lost. For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat, is like being
seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying
beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you. It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of
these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other,
without the slightest warning; and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness
of volition and action, can you escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all-
seeing sun himself could never pierce you out.
Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is
perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of
the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the
ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the
oarsmen before being brought into actual play—this is a thing which carries more of true terror
than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-
lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn
of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a
philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror,
than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
 CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.
If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to Queequeg it was quite a
different object.
"When you see him 'quid," said the savage, honing his harpoon in the bow of his hoisted boat,
"then you quick see him 'parm whale."
The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to engage them, the
Pequod's crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of
the Indian Ocean through which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground;
that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of
more stirring waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.
It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders leaning against the
slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution
could withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my
body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the power which first
moved it is withdrawn.
Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen at the main and
mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last all three of us lifelessly swung from the
spars, and for every swing that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering
helmsman. The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance of the sea,
east nodded to west, and the sun over all.
Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my hands grasped the
shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me; with a shock I came back to life. And lo!
close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the
capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun's rays
like a mirror. But lazily undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his
vapoury jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon. But that
pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by some enchanter's wand, the sleepy ship and every
sleeper in it all at once started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts of
the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted forth the accustomed cry, as the
great fish slowly and regularly spouted the sparkling brine into the air.
"Clear away the boats! Luff!" cried Ahab. And obeying his own order, he dashed the helm down
before the helmsman could handle the spokes.
The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere the boats were
down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward, but with such a steady tranquillity, and
making so few ripples as he swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab
gave orders that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers. So seated
like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats, we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not
admitting of the noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the monster
perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed
up.
"There go flukes!" was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by Stubb's producing his
match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite was granted. After the full interval of his sounding had
elapsed, the whale rose again, and being now in advance of the smoker's boat, and much nearer
to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the honour of the capture. It was obvious, now,
that the whale had at length become aware of his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was
therefore no longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play. And still puffing
at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the assault.
 Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy, he was going "head out";
that part obliquely projecting from the mad yeast which he brewed.*
*It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the entire interior of the sperm
whale's enormous head consists. Though apparently the most massive, it is by far the most
buoyant part about him. So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does so when
going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the upper part of the front of his head,
and such the tapering cut-water formation of the lower part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he
thereby may be said to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish galliot into a sharppointed
New York pilot-boat.
"Start her, start her, my men! Don't hurry yourselves; take plenty of time—but start her; start her
like thunder-claps, that's all," cried Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. "Start her, now;
give 'em the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my boy—start her, all; but keep cool,
keep cool—cucumbers is the word—easy, easy—only start her like grim death and grinning devils,
and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys—that's all. Start her!"
"Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!" screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some old war-whoop to the
skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat involuntarily bounced forward with the one
tremendous leading stroke which the eager Indian gave.
But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. "Kee-hee! Kee-hee!" yelled
Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat, like a pacing tiger in his cage.
"Ka-la! Koo-loo!" howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a mouthful of Grenadier's
steak. And thus with oars and yells the keels cut the sea. Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in
the van, still encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke from his mouth. Like
desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the welcome cry was heard—"Stand up, Tashtego!
—give it to him!" The harpoon was hurled. "Stern all!" The oarsmen backed water; the same
moment something went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists. It was the magical line. An
instant before, Stubb had swiftly caught two additional turns with it round the loggerhead, whence,
by reason of its increased rapid circlings, a hempen blue smoke now jetted up and mingled with
the steady fumes from his pipe. As the line passed round and round the loggerhead; so also, just
before reaching that point, it blisteringly passed through and through both of Stubb's hands, from
which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at these times, had
accidentally dropped. It was like holding an enemy's sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that
enemy all the time striving to wrest it out of your clutch.
"Wet the line! wet the line!" cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated by the tub) who,
snatching off his hat, dashed sea-water into it.* More turns were taken, so that the line began
holding its place. The boat now flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins. Stubb and
Tashtego here changed places—stem for stern—a staggering business truly in that rocking
commotion.
*Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be stated, that, in the old Dutch
fishery, a mop was used to dash the running line with water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin,
or bailer, is set apart for that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most convenient.
From the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper part of the boat, and from its now
being more tight than a harpstring, you would have thought the craft had two keels—one cleaving
the water, the other the air—as the boat churned on through both opposing elements at once. A
continual cascade played at the bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy in her wake; and, at the slightest
motion from within, even but of a little finger, the vibrating, cracking craft canted over her
spasmodic gunwale into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man with might and main clinging to his
seat, to prevent being tossed to the foam; and the tall form of Tashtego at the steering oar
crouching almost double, in order to bring down his centre of gravity. Whole Atlantics and Pacifics
seemed passed as they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat slackened his flight.
"Haul in—haul in!" cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round towards the whale, all hands
began pulling the boat up to him, while yet the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by his
flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the flying fish; at
the word of command, the boat alternately sterning out of the way of the whale's horrible wallow,
and then ranging up for another fling.
The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a hill. His tormented
body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake.
The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face,
so that they all glowed to each other like red men. And all the while, jet after jet of white smoke was
agonizingly shot from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of the
excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked lance (by the line attached to it),
Stubb straightened it again and again, by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and
again sent it into the whale.
"Pull up—pull up!" he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale relaxed in his wrath. "Pull
up!—close to!" and the boat ranged along the fish's flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb
slowly churned his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and churning,
as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed, and
which he was fearful of breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the
innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting from his trance into that unspeakable
thing called his "flurry," the monster horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself in
impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping astern, had much
ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied twilight into the clear air of the day.
And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view; surging from side to side;
spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations.
At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into
the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. His
heart had burst!
"He's dead, Mr. Stubb," said Daggoo.
"Yes; both pipes smoked out!" and withdrawing his own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the
dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had
made.
 CHAPTER 62. The Dart.
A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.
According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes off from the ship, with the
headsman or whale-killer as temporary steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling
the foremost oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong, nervous arm to
strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in what is called a long dart, the heavy implement has to
be flung to the distance of twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase,
the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost; indeed, he is expected to
set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated
loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top of one's compass, while
all the other muscles are strained and half started—what that is none know but those who have
tried it. For one, I cannot bawl very heartily and work very recklessly at one and the same time. In
this straining, bawling state, then, with his back to the fish, all at once the exhausted harpooneer
hears the exciting cry—"Stand up, and give it to him!" He now has to drop and secure his oar, turn
round on his centre half way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and with what little strength may
remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the whale. No wonder, taking the whole fleet of
whalemen in a body, that out of fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that
so many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some of them
actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm whalemen are absent
four years with four barrels; no wonder that to many ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern;
for it is the harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can
you expect to find it there when most wanted!
Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant, that is, when the whale starts
to run, the boatheader and harpooneer likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent
jeopardy of themselves and every one else. It is then they change places; and the headsman, the
chief officer of the little craft, takes his proper station in the bows of the boat.
Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish and unnecessary. The
headsman should stay in the bows from first to last; he should both dart the harpoon and the lance,
and no rowing whatever should be expected of him, except under circumstances obvious to any
fisherman. I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in the chase; but long
experience in various whalemen of more than one nation has convinced me that in the vast
majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale as
the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them.
To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet
from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.
 CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.
Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the
chapters.
The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention. It is a notched stick of
a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard
gunwale near the bow, for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the harpoon,
whose other naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the prow. Thereby the weapon is instantly
at hand to its hurler, who snatches it up as readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his rifle
from the wall. It is customary to have two harpoons reposing in the crotch, respectively called the
first and second irons.
But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with the line; the object being
this: to dart them both, if possible, one instantly after the other into the same whale; so that if, in the
coming drag, one should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It is a doubling of the chances.
But it very often happens that owing to the instantaneous, violent, convulsive running of the whale
upon receiving the first iron, it becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however lightning-like in his
movements, to pitch the second iron into him. Nevertheless, as the second iron is already
connected with the line, and the line is running, hence that weapon must, at all events, be
anticipatingly tossed out of the boat, somehow and somewhere; else the most terrible jeopardy
would involve all hands. Tumbled into the water, it accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of
box line (mentioned in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in most instances, prudently
practicable. But this critical act is not always unattended with the saddest and most fatal
casualties.
Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown overboard, it thenceforth
becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror, skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale,
entangling the lines, or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions. Nor, in
general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is fairly captured and a corpse.
Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging one unusually strong, active,
and knowing whale; when owing to these qualities in him, as well as to the thousand concurring
accidents of such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be simultaneously
dangling about him. For, of course, each boat is supplied with several harpoons to bend on to the
line should the first one be ineffectually darted without recovery. All these particulars are faithfully
narrated here, as they will not fail to elucidate several most important, however intricate passages,
in scenes hereafter to be painted.
 CHAPTER 64. Stubb's Supper.
Stubb's whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was a calm; so, forming a tandem
of three boats, we commenced the slow business of towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, as
we eighteen men with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers, slowly
toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at
all, except at long intervals; good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass
we moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they call it, in China, four or five
laborers on the foot-path will draw a bulky freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this grand
argosy we towed heavily forged along, as if laden with pig-lead in bulk.
Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod's main-rigging dimly guided our
way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab dropping one of several more lanterns over the bulwarks.
Vacantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual orders for securing it for the
night, and then handing his lantern to a seaman, went his way into the cabin, and did not come
forward again until morning.
Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had evinced his customary
activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or
impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that
Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship, all
that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object. Very soon you would have thought
from the sound on the Pequod's decks, that all hands were preparing to cast anchor in the deep;
for heavy chains are being dragged along the deck, and thrust rattling out of the port-holes. But by
those clanking links, the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored. Tied by the head to the
stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies with its black hull close to the vessel's and
seen through the darkness of the night, which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two—ship
and whale, seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines while the other
remains standing.*
*A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most reliable hold which the ship
has upon the whale when moored alongside, is by the flukes or tail; and as from its greater density
that part is relatively heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its flexibility even in death,
causes it to sink low beneath the surface; so that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in
order to put the chain round it. But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a small, strong line is
prepared with a wooden float at its outer end, and a weight in its middle, while the other end is
secured to the ship. By adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the other side of
the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily made to follow suit; and being
slipped along the body, is at last locked fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of
junction with its broad flukes or lobes.
If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be known on deck, Stubb, his
second mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an unusual but still good-natured excitement. Such
an unwonted bustle was he in that the staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned to him
for the time the sole management of affairs. One small, helping cause of all this liveliness in Stubb,
was soon made strangely manifest. Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond
of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.
"A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut me one from his small!"
Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a general thing, and according to
the great military maxim, make the enemy defray the current expenses of the war (at least before
realizing the proceeds of the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers who
have a genuine relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale designated by Stubb; comprising
the tapering extremity of the body.
About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two lanterns of sperm oil, Stubb
stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a
sideboard. Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale's flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings
with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan,
smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the
sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers' hearts. Peering
over the side you could just see them (as before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black
waters, and turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of
the bigness of a human head. This particular feat of the shark seems all but miraculous. How at
such an apparently unassailable surface, they contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls,
remains a part of the universal problem of all things. The mark they thus leave on the whale, may
best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw.
Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly
gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved,
ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers
over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other's live meat with carving-knives all gilded
and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away
under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it
would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all
parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic,
systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead
slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down,
touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and
most hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such
countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored
by night to a whaleship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about
the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.
But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was going on so nigh him, no
more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his own epicurean lips.
"Cook, cook!—where's that old Fleece?" he cried at length, widening his legs still further, as if to
form a more secure base for his supper; and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if
stabbing with his lance; "cook, you cook!—sail this way, cook!"
The old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously roused from his warm
hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling along from his galley, for, like many old
blacks, there was something the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured
like his other pans; this old Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and limping along, assisting
his step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops; this
old Ebony floundered along, and in obedience to the word of command, came to a dead stop on
the opposite side of Stubb's sideboard; when, with both hands folded before him, and resting on
his two-legged cane, he bowed his arched back still further over, at the same time sideways
inclining his head, so as to bring his best ear into play.
"Cook," said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth, "don't you think this
steak is rather overdone? You've been beating this steak too much, cook; it's too tender. Don't I
always say that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough? There are those sharks now over the
side, don't you see they prefer it tough and rare? What a shindy they are kicking up! Cook, go and
talk to 'em; tell 'em they are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must
keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and deliver my message. Here, take
this lantern," snatching one from his sideboard; "now then, go and preach to 'em!"
Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck to the bulwarks; and then,
with one hand dropping his light low over the sea, so as to get a good view of his congregation,
with the other hand he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a mumbling
voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling behind, overheard all that was
said.
 "Fellow-critters: I'se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise dare. You hear? Stop
dat dam smackin' ob de lips! Massa Stubb say dat you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings,
but by Gor! you must stop dat dam racket!"
"Cook," here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap on the
shoulder,—"Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn't swear that way when you're preaching. That's
no way to convert sinners, cook!"
"Who dat? Den preach to him yourself," sullenly turning to go.
"No, cook; go on, go on."
"Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:"—
"Right!" exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, "coax 'em to it; try that," and Fleece continued.
"Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you, fellow-critters, dat dat
woraciousness—'top dat dam slappin' ob de tail! How you tink to hear, spose you keep up such a
dam slappin' and bitin' dare?"
"Cook," cried Stubb, collaring him, "I won't have that swearing. Talk to 'em gentlemanly."
Once more the sermon proceeded.
"Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can't be
helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de
shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned. Now,
look here, bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don't be tearin' de
blubber out your neighbour's mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as toder to dat whale? And, by
Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else. I know some o' you
has berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de small bellies; so
dat de brigness of de mout is not to swaller wid, but to bit off de blubber for de small fry ob sharks,
dat can't get into de scrouge to help demselves."
"Well done, old Fleece!" cried Stubb, "that's Christianity; go on."
"No use goin' on; de dam willains will keep a scougin' and slappin' each oder, Massa Stubb; dey
don't hear one word; no use a-preaching to such dam g'uttons as you call 'em, till dare bellies is full,
and dare bellies is bottomless; and when dey do get 'em full, dey wont hear you den; for den dey
sink in the sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and can't hear noting at all, no more, for eber and
eber."
"Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction, Fleece, and I'll away to
my supper."
Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his shrill voice, and cried—
"Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill your dam bellies 'till dey
bust—and den die."
"Now, cook," said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; "stand just where you stood
before, there, over against me, and pay particular attention."
"All 'dention," said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the desired position.
"Well," said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; "I shall now go back to the subject of this
steak. In the first place, how old are you, cook?"
"What dat do wid de 'teak," said the old black, testily.
"Silence! How old are you, cook?"
"'Bout ninety, dey say," he gloomily muttered.
 "And you have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook, and don't know yet how to
cook a whale-steak?" rapidly bolting another mouthful at the last word, so that morsel seemed a
continuation of the question. "Where were you born, cook?"
"'Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin' ober de Roanoke."
"Born in a ferry-boat! That's queer, too. But I want to know what country you were born in, cook!"
"Didn't I say de Roanoke country?" he cried sharply.
"No, you didn't, cook; but I'll tell you what I'm coming to, cook. You must go home and be born
over again; you don't know how to cook a whale-steak yet."
"Bress my soul, if I cook noder one," he growled, angrily, turning round to depart.
"Come back here, cook;—here, hand me those tongs;—now take that bit of steak there, and tell
me if you think that steak cooked as it should be? Take it, I say"—holding the tongs towards
him—"take it, and taste it."
Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old negro muttered, "Best cooked
'teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy."
"Cook," said Stubb, squaring himself once more; "do you belong to the church?"
"Passed one once in Cape-Down," said the old man sullenly.
"And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town, where you doubtless
overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his beloved fellow-creatures, have you, cook!
And yet you come here, and tell me such a dreadful lie as you did just now, eh?" said Stubb.
"Where do you expect to go to, cook?"
"Go to bed berry soon," he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.
"Avast! heave to! I mean when you die, cook. It's an awful question. Now what's your answer?"
"When dis old brack man dies," said the negro slowly, changing his whole air and demeanor,
"he hisself won't go nowhere; but some bressed angel will come and fetch him."
"Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch him where?"
"Up dere," said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, and keeping it there very
solemnly.
"So, then, you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when you are dead? But don't
you know the higher you climb, the colder it gets? Main-top, eh?"
"Didn't say dat t'all," said Fleece, again in the sulks.
"You said up there, didn't you? and now look yourself, and see where your tongs are pointing.
But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by crawling through the lubber's hole, cook; but, no, no,
cook, you don't get there, except you go the regular way, round by the rigging. It's a ticklish
business, but must be done, or else it's no go. But none of us are in heaven yet. Drop your tongs,
cook, and hear my orders. Do ye hear? Hold your hat in one hand, and clap t'other a'top of your
heart, when I'm giving my orders, cook. What! that your heart, there?—that's your gizzard! Aloft!
aloft!—that's it—now you have it. Hold it there now, and pay attention."
"All 'dention," said the old black, with both hands placed as desired, vainly wriggling his grizzled
head, as if to get both ears in front at one and the same time.
"Well then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad, that I have put it out of sight
as soon as possible; you see that, don't you? Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-
steak for my private table here, the capstan, I'll tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by overdoing.
Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other; that done, dish it; d'ye hear?
And now to-morrow, cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by to get the tips of
his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the ends of the flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now
ye may go."
But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.
"Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D'ye hear? away you sail,
then.—Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go.—Avast heaving again! Whale-balls for breakfast
—don't forget."
"Wish, by gor! whale eat him, 'stead of him eat whale. I'm bressed if he ain't more of shark dan
Massa Shark hisself," muttered the old man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to
his hammock.
 CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.
That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him by
his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into
the history and philosophy of it.
It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was esteemed a great
delicacy in France, and commanded large prices there. Also, that in Henry VIIIth's time, a certain
cook of the court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be eaten with
barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to
this day considered fine eating. The meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and
being well seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls. The old monks of
Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great porpoise grant from the crown.
The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands be considered a noble
dish, were there not so much of him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one
hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of men like Stubb,
nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious. We all know how
they live upon whales, and have rare old vintages of prime old train oil. Zogranda, one of their most
famous doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly juicy and
nourishing. And this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who long ago were accidentally left in
Greenland by a whaling vessel—that these men actually lived for several months on the mouldy
scraps of whales which had been left ashore after trying out the blubber. Among the Dutch
whalemen these scraps are called "fritters"; which, indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown and
crisp, and smelling something like old Amsterdam housewives' dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when
fresh. They have such an eatable look that the most self-denying stranger can hardly keep his
hands off.
But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his exceeding richness. He is the
great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as fine
eating as the buffalo's (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid pyramid of fat. But
the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is; like the transparent, half-jellied, white meat of
a cocoanut in the third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for butter.
Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into some other substance, and then
partaking of it. In the long try watches of the night it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their
ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many a good supper have I thus
made.
In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The casket of the skull
is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling
two large puddings), they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess, in
flavor somewhat resembling calves' head, which is quite a dish among some epicures; and every
one knows that some young bucks among the epicures, by continually dining upon calves' brains,
by and by get to have a little brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a calf's head from their own
heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon discrimination. And that is the reason why a young buck
with an intelligent looking calf's head before him, is somehow one of the saddest sights you can
see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully at him, with an "Et tu Brute!" expression.
It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to
regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the
consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and
eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a
murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would
have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market of a Saturday
night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not
that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will
be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming
famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee,
civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated
livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.
But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it?
Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef,
what is that handle made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And
what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl.
And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders
formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that that society passed a
resolution to patronise nothing but steel pens.
 CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.
When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought
alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the
business of cutting him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very soon
completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the common usage is to take in all
sail; lash the helm a'lee; and then send every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the
reservation that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two for an hour, each
couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see that all goes well.
But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because
such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six
hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. In most other
parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound, their wondrous voracity
can be at times considerably diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades,
a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle them into still greater
activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the Pequod's sharks; though, to be sure, any
man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost
thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.
Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was concluded; and when,
accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on deck, no small excitement was created
among the sharks; for immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three
lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two mariners, darting their
long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks,* by striking the keen steel
deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed and
struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their mark; and this brought about new
revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each other's
disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed
swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound.
Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of
generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be
called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of
these sharks almost took poor Queequeg's hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his
murderous jaw.
*The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel; is about the bigness of a
man's spread hand; and in general shape, corresponds to the garden implement after which it is
named; only its sides are perfectly flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than the lower.
This weapon is always kept as sharp as possible; and when being used is occasionally honed, just
like a razor. In its socket, a stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.
"Queequeg no care what god made him shark," said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up
and down; "wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam
Ingin."
 CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio professors of Sabbath
breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble; every
sailor a butcher. You would have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea
gods.
In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous things comprising a
cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which no single man can possibly lift—this vast
bunch of grapes was swayed up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the
strongest point anywhere above a ship's deck. The end of the hawser-like rope winding through
these intricacies, was then conducted to the windlass, and the huge lower block of the tackles was
swung over the whale; to this block the great blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds,
was attached. And now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, armed
with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the body for the insertion of the hook just above the
nearest of the two side-fins. This done, a broad, semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is
inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in one
dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in
her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her
frighted mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping
heave of the windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till at last, a swift, startling
snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls upwards and backwards from the whale, and the
triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip
of blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it
stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. For the
strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the
water, and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the "scarf,"
simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as it is thus
peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time being hoisted higher and higher aloft
till its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a
moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky,
and every one present must take good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears
and pitch him headlong overboard.
One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon called a boarding-
sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices out a considerable hole in the lower part of
the swaying mass. Into this hole, the end of the second alternating great tackle is then hooked so
as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what follows. Whereupon, this
accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at
the mass, and with a few sidelong, desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in twain; so
that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper strip, called a blanket-piece, swings clear,
and is all ready for lowering. The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the one tackle
is peeling and hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other is slowly slackened away, and
down goes the first strip through the main hatchway right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called
the blubber-room. Into this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long
blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents. And thus the work proceeds; the
two tackles hoisting and lowering simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers
singing, the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship straining, and all hands
swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the general friction.
 CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.
I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale. I have had
controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My
original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion.
The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you know what his blubber is.
That blubber is something of the consistence of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic
and compact, and ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.
Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature's skin as being of that
sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of fact these are no arguments against such a
presumption; because you cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale's body
but that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably dense,
what can that be but the skin? True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off
with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds
of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it
not only contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits,
which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the
printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At
any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say. But
what I am driving at here is this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit,
invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as
the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the
tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of
this.
Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in the case of a very
large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that,
in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths, and not the entire
substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass,
a mere part of whose mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels
to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of the stuff of the whale's skin.
In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he
presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight
marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do
not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen
through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the
quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far
other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the
walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By
my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck
with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades
on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale
remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all
the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the
back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by
reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that
those New England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent
scraping contact with vast floating icebergs—I should say, that those rocks must not a little
resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale
are probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the
large, full-grown bulls of the species.
A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the whale. It has already
been said, that it is stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this
one is very happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real
blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his
extremity. It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep
himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would become of a
Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy
surtout? True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it
observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that
warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire;
whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies. How
wonderful is it then—except after explanation—that this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth
is as indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed to
his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes
found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found
glued in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood
of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo negro in summer.
It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare
virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model
thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without
being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St.
Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few are domed
like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!
 CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!
The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the beheaded whale
flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk.
It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the
insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks
are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further
and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and
cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary
ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the
pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in
infinite perspectives.
There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in pious mourning, the air-
sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I
ween, if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral they most piously do
pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free.
Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to
scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the
distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun,
and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with
trembling fingers is set down in the log—SHOALS, ROCKS, AND BREAKERS HEREABOUTS:
BEWARE! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep
leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There's
your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of
old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy!
Thus, while in life the great whale's body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his
ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.
Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far
deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.
 CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.
It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping the body of the leviathan, he
was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon
which experienced whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason.
Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck; on the contrary, where
his head and body seem to join, there, in that very place, is the thickest part of him. Remember,
also, that the surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening between him
and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a discoloured, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous
and bursting sea. Bear in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many
feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without so much as getting one single
peep into the ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skilfully steer clear of all adjacent,
interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion into the skull.
Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb's boast, that he demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm
whale?
When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a cable till the body is
stripped. That done, if it belong to a small whale it is hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed
of. But, with a full grown leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm whale's head embraces nearly
one third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a burden as that, even by the immense
tackles of a whaler, this were as vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers'
scales.
The Pequod's whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was hoisted against the
ship's side—about half way out of the sea, so that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its
native element. And there with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason of the
enormous downward drag from the lower mast-head, and every yard-arm on that side projecting
like a crane over the waves; there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod's waist like the
giant Holofernes's from the girdle of Judith.
When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went below to their dinner.
Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but now deserted deck. An intense copper calm, like a
universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the
sea.
A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone from his cabin. Taking
a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the main-
chains he took Stubb's long spade—still remaining there after the whale's Decapitation—and
striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended mass, placed its other end crutch-wise under
one arm, and so stood leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.
It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed
the Sphynx's in the desert. "Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though
ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and
tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon
which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded
names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate
earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was
thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a
sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the
locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting
wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate
when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the
insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—while swift lightnings shivered the
neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O
head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one
syllable is thine!"
"Sail ho!" cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.
"Aye? Well, now, that's cheering," cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunder-
clouds swept aside from his brow. "That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a
better man.—Where away?"
"Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to us!
"Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my
breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are
your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in
mind."
 CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam's Story.
Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than the ship, and soon the
Pequod began to rock.
By and by, through the glass the stranger's boats and manned mast-heads proved her a whale-
ship. But as she was so far to windward, and shooting by, apparently making a passage to some
other ground, the Pequod could not hope to reach her. So the signal was set to see what response
would be made.
Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships of the American Whale Fleet
have each a private signal; all which signals being collected in a book with the names of the
respective vessels attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale commanders are
enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at considerable distances and with no
small facility.
The Pequod's signal was at last responded to by the stranger's setting her own; which proved
the ship to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam
under the Pequod's lee, and lowered a boat; it soon drew nigh; but, as the side-ladder was being
rigged by Starbuck's order to accommodate the visiting captain, the stranger in question waved
his hand from his boat's stern in token of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It turned out
that the Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her captain, was fearful
of infecting the Pequod's company. For, though himself and boat's crew remained untainted, and
though his ship was half a rifle-shot off, and an incorruptible sea and air rolling and flowing
between; yet conscientiously adhering to the timid quarantine of the land, he peremptorily refused
to come into direct contact with the Pequod.
But this did by no means prevent all communications. Preserving an interval of some few yards
between itself and the ship, the Jeroboam's boat by the occasional use of its oars contrived to
keep parallel to the Pequod, as she heavily forged through the sea (for by this time it blew very
fresh), with her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by the sudden onset of a large rolling
wave, the boat would be pushed some way ahead; but would be soon skilfully brought to her
proper bearings again. Subject to this, and other the like interruptions now and then, a
conversation was sustained between the two parties; but at intervals not without still another
interruption of a very different sort.
Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam's boat, was a man of a singular appearance, even in that wild
whaling life where individual notabilities make up all totalities. He was a small, short, youngish
man, sprinkled all over his face with freckles, and wearing redundant yellow hair. A long-skirted,
cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge enveloped him; the overlapping sleeves of which
were rolled up on his wrists. A deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes.
So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had exclaimed—"That's he! that's he!—the
long-togged scaramouch the Town-Ho's company told us of!" Stubb here alluded to a strange story
told of the Jeroboam, and a certain man among her crew, some time previous when the Pequod
spoke the Town-Ho. According to this account and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that
the scaramouch in question had gained a wonderful ascendency over almost everybody in the
Jeroboam. His story was this:
He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna Shakers, where he had
been a great prophet; in their cracked, secret meetings having several times descended from
heaven by the way of a trap-door, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he
carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, instead of containing gunpowder, was supposed to be
charged with laudanum. A strange, apostolic whim having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for
Nantucket, where, with that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common-sense
exterior, and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the Jeroboam's whaling voyage. They
engaged him; but straightway upon the ship's getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a
freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded the captain to jump
overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of
the sea and vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness with which he declared
these things;—the dark, daring play of his sleepless, excited imagination, and all the preternatural
terrors of real delirium, united to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the ignorant
crew, with an atmosphere of sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid of him. As such a man,
however, was not of much practical use in the ship, especially as he refused to work except when
he pleased, the incredulous captain would fain have been rid of him; but apprised that that
individual's intention was to land him in the first convenient port, the archangel forthwith opened all
his seals and vials—devoting the ship and all hands to unconditional perdition, in case this
intention was carried out. So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the crew, that at last in
a body they went to the captain and told him if Gabriel was sent from the ship, not a man of them
would remain. He was therefore forced to relinquish his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel to be
any way maltreated, say or do what he would; so that it came to pass that Gabriel had the
complete freedom of the ship. The consequence of all this was, that the archangel cared little or
nothing for the captain and mates; and since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a higher
hand than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole command; nor should it
be stayed but according to his good pleasure. The sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some
of them fawned before him; in obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal
homage, as to a god. Such things may seem incredible; but, however wondrous, they are true. Nor
is the history of fanatics half so striking in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic
himself, as his measureless power of deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But it is time to
return to the Pequod.
"I fear not thy epidemic, man," said Ahab from the bulwarks, to Captain Mayhew, who stood in
the boat's stern; "come on board."
But now Gabriel started to his feet.
"Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious! Beware of the horrible plague!"
"Gabriel! Gabriel!" cried Captain Mayhew; "thou must either—" But that instant a headlong wave
shot the boat far ahead, and its seethings drowned all speech.
"Hast thou seen the White Whale?" demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted back.
"Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible tail!"
"I tell thee again, Gabriel, that—" But again the boat tore ahead as if dragged by fiends. Nothing
was said for some moments, while a succession of riotous waves rolled by, which by one of those
occasional caprices of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted sperm
whale's head jogged about very violently, and Gabriel was seen eyeing it with rather more
apprehensiveness than his archangel nature seemed to warrant.
When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story concerning Moby Dick; not,
however, without frequent interruptions from Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and the
crazy sea that seemed leagued with him.
It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking a whale-ship, her
people were reliably apprised of the existence of Moby Dick, and the havoc he had made.
Greedily sucking in this intelligence, Gabriel solemnly warned the captain against attacking the
White Whale, in case the monster should be seen; in his gibbering insanity, pronouncing the White
Whale to be no less a being than the Shaker God incarnated; the Shakers receiving the Bible. But
when, some year or two afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads, Macey, the
chief mate, burned with ardour to encounter him; and the captain himself being not unwilling to let
him have the opportunity, despite all the archangel's denunciations and forewarnings, Macey
succeeded in persuading five men to man his boat. With them he pushed off; and, after much
weary pulling, and many perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last succeeded in getting one iron
fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic
gestures, and hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants of his divinity.
Now, while Macey, the mate, was standing up in his boat's bow, and with all the reckless energy of
his tribe was venting his wild exclamations upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance for
his poised lance, lo! a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its quick, fanning motion,
temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies of the oarsmen. Next instant, the luckless mate, so
full of furious life, was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the
sea at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any
oarsman's head; but the mate for ever sank.
It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is
perhaps almost as frequent as any. Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is thus
annihilated; oftener the boat's bow is knocked off, or the thigh-board, in which the headsman
stands, is torn from its place and accompanies the body. But strangest of all is the circumstance,
that in more instances than one, when the body has been recovered, not a single mark of violence
is discernible; the man being stark dead.
The whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried from the ship. Raising a
piercing shriek—"The vial! the vial!" Gabriel called off the terror-stricken crew from the further
hunting of the whale. This terrible event clothed the archangel with added influence; because his
credulous disciples believed that he had specifically fore-announced it, instead of only making a
general prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one of many marks
in the wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror to the ship.
Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to him, that the stranger
captain could not forbear inquiring whether he intended to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity
should offer. To which Ahab answered—"Aye." Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started to his
feet, glaring upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with downward pointed finger—"Think,
think of the blasphemer—dead, and down there!—beware of the blasphemer's end!"
Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, "Captain, I have just bethought me of my letter-
bag; there is a letter for one of thy officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag."
Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships, whose delivery to the
persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon the mere chance of encountering them in
the four oceans. Thus, most letters never reach their mark; and many are only received after
attaining an age of two or three years or more.
Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely tumbled, damp, and covered with
a dull, spotted, green mould, in consequence of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a
letter, Death himself might well have been the post-boy.
"Can'st not read it?" cried Ahab. "Give it me, man. Aye, aye, it's but a dim scrawl;—what's this?"
As he was studying it out, Starbuck took a long cutting-spade pole, and with his knife slightly split
the end, to insert the letter there, and in that way, hand it to the boat, without its coming any closer
to the ship.
Meantime, Ahab holding the letter, muttered, "Mr. Har—yes, Mr. Harry—(a woman's pinny hand,
—the man's wife, I'll wager)—Aye—Mr. Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam;—why it's Macey, and he's
dead!"
"Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife," sighed Mayhew; "but let me have it."
"Nay, keep it thyself," cried Gabriel to Ahab; "thou art soon going that way."
"Curses throttle thee!" yelled Ahab. "Captain Mayhew, stand by now to receive it"; and taking the
fatal missive from Starbuck's hands, he caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached it over towards
the boat. But as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted from rowing; the boat drifted a little
towards the ship's stern; so that, as if by magic, the letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel's
eager hand. He clutched it in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the letter on it, sent it
thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab's feet. Then Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to
give way with their oars, and in that manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.
As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of the whale, many
strange things were hinted in reference to this wild affair.
 CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.
In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running
backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here, and then again hands are
wanted there. There is no staying in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to
be done everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description of the scene. We
must now retrace our way a little. It was mentioned that upon first breaking ground in the whale's
back, the blubber-hook was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the mates.
But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook get fixed in that hole? It was
inserted there by my particular friend Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend
upon the monster's back for the special purpose referred to. But in very many cases,
circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the whole tensing or
stripping operation is concluded. The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged,
excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the level of the
deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast
mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the
Highland costume—a shirt and socks—in which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon
advantage; and no one had a better chance to observe him, as will presently be seen.
Being the savage's bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his boat (the second
one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble
scramble upon the dead whale's back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by
a long cord. Just so, from the ship's steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, by
what is technically called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted
round his waist.
It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we proceed further, it must be
said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast to Queequeg's broad canvas belt, and fast to
my narrow leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and
should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honour demanded, that instead
of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature
united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the
dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.
So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching
his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint
stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another's mistake or
misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. Therefore, I saw that here
was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have so gross an
injustice. And yet still further pondering—while I jerked him now and then from between the whale
and ship, which would threaten to jam him—still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of
mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or
other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap;
if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by
exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life.
But handle Queequeg's monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came
very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the
management of one end of it.*
*The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod that the monkey and his
holder were ever tied together. This improvement upon the original usage was introduced by no
less a man than Stubb, in order to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible
guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder.
I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the whale and the ship—where
he would occasionally fall, from the incessant rolling and swaying of both. But this was not the only
jamming jeopardy he was exposed to. Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the
night, the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent blood which began to flow
from the carcass—the rabid creatures swarmed round it like bees in a beehive.
And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside with his
floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were it not that attracted by such prey as a dead
whale, the otherwise miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man.
Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a ravenous finger in the pie, it is
deemed but wise to look sharp to them. Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which I now
and then jerked the poor fellow from too close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed a peculiarly
ferocious shark—he was provided with still another protection. Suspended over the side in one of
the stages, Tashtego and Daggoo continually flourished over his head a couple of keen whale-
spades, wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could reach. This procedure of theirs,
to be sure, was very disinterested and benevolent of them. They meant Queequeg's best
happiness, I admit; but in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and from the circumstance that both he
and the sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled water, those indiscreet spades of
theirs would come nearer amputating a leg than a tall. But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining
and gasping there with that great iron hook—poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his Yojo,
and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.
Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in and then slacked off the
rope to every swell of the sea—what matters it, after all? Are you not the precious image of each
and all of us men in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks,
your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad
pickle and peril, poor lad.
But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as with blue lips and
blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at last climbs up the chains and stands all dripping and
involuntarily trembling over the side; the steward advances, and with a benevolent, consolatory
glance hands him—what? Some hot Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands him a cup of tepid
ginger and water!
"Ginger? Do I smell ginger?" suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near. "Yes, this must be ginger,"
peering into the as yet untasted cup. Then standing as if incredulous for a while, he calmly walked
towards the astonished steward slowly saying, "Ginger? ginger? and will you have the goodness to
tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of ginger? Ginger! is ginger the sort of fuel you use,
Dough-boy, to kindle a fire in this shivering cannibal? Ginger!—what the devil is ginger? Sea-coal?
firewood?—lucifer matches?—tinder?—gunpowder?—what the devil is ginger, I say, that you offer
this cup to our poor Queequeg here."
"There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business," he suddenly
added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just come from forward. "Will you look at that
kannakin, sir; smell of it, if you please." Then watching the mate's countenance, he added, "The
steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there, this instant
off the whale. Is the steward an apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bitters by
which he blows back the life into a half-drowned man?"
"I trust not," said Starbuck, "it is poor stuff enough."
"Aye, aye, steward," cried Stubb, "we'll teach you to drug it harpooneer; none of your
apothecary's medicine here; you want to poison us, do ye? You have got out insurances on our
lives and want to murder us all, and pocket the proceeds, do ye?"
"It was not me," cried Dough-Boy, "it was Aunt Charity that brought the ginger on board; and
bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits, but only this ginger-jub—so she called it."
"Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye to the lockers, and get
something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr. Starbuck. It is the captain's orders—grog for the
harpooneer on a whale."
 "Enough," replied Starbuck, "only don't hit him again, but—"
"Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of that sort; and this fellow's a
weazel. What were you about saying, sir?"
"Only this: go down with him, and get what thou wantest thyself."
When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort of tea-caddy in the
other. The first contained strong spirits, and was handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt
Charity's gift, and that was freely given to the waves.
 CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and
Then Have a Talk
Over Him.
It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale's prodigious head hanging to
the Pequod's side. But we must let it continue hanging there a while till we can get a chance to
attend to it. For the present other matters press, and the best we can do now for the head, is to
pray heaven the tackles may hold.
Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually drifted into a sea, which, by
its occasional patches of yellow brit, gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species
of the Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking anywhere near. And
though all hands commonly disdained the capture of those inferior creatures; and though the
Pequod was not commissioned to cruise for them at all, and though she had passed numbers of
them near the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale had been brought
alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the announcement was made that a Right Whale
should be captured that day, if opportunity offered.
Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two boats, Stubb's and Flask's,
were detached in pursuit. Pulling further and further away, they at last became almost invisible to
the men at the mast-head. But suddenly in the distance, they saw a great heap of tumultuous white
water, and soon after news came from aloft that one or both the boats must be fast. An interval
passed and the boats were in plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the ship by the
towing whale. So close did the monster come to the hull, that at first it seemed as if he meant it
malice; but suddenly going down in a maelstrom, within three rods of the planks, he wholly
disappeared from view, as if diving under the keel. "Cut, cut!" was the cry from the ship to the
boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being brought with a deadly dash against the
vessel's side. But having plenty of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very rapidly, they
paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with all their might so as to get ahead of
the ship. For a few minutes the struggle was intensely critical; for while they still slacked out the
tightened line in one direction, and still plied their oars in another, the contending strain threatened
to take them under. But it was only a few feet advance they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till
they did gain it; when instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the keel, as the
strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose to view under her bows, snapping and
quivering; and so flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like bits of broken glass on the water,
while the whale beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were free to fly. But the fagged
whale abated his speed, and blindly altering his course, went round the stern of the ship towing the
two boats after him, so that they performed a complete circuit.
Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close flanking him on both sides,
Stubb answered Flask with lance for lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went,
while the multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm Whale's body, rushed to the
fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking at every new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the
new bursting fountains that poured from the smitten rock.
At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he turned upon his back a corpse.
While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes, and in other ways
getting the mass in readiness for towing, some conversation ensued between them.
"I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard," said Stubb, not without some
disgust at the thought of having to do with so ignoble a leviathan.
"Wants with it?" said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat's bow, "did you never hear that
the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale's head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the
same time a Right Whale's on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never
same time a Right Whale's on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never
afterwards capsize?"
"Why not?
"I don't know, but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying so, and he seems to know all
about ships' charms. But I sometimes think he'll charm the ship to no good at last. I don't half like
that chap, Stubb. Did you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of carved into a snake's head,
Stubb?"
"Sink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a dark night, and he standing
hard by the bulwarks, and no one by; look down there, Flask"—pointing into the sea with a peculiar
motion of both hands—"Aye, will I! Flask, I take that Fedallah to be the devil in disguise. Do you
believe that cock and bull story about his having been stowed away on board ship? He's the devil, I
say. The reason why you don't see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries it coiled
away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now that I think of it, he's always wanting oakum to stuff into
the toes of his boots."
"He sleeps in his boots, don't he? He hasn't got any hammock; but I've seen him lay of nights in
a coil of rigging."
"No doubt, and it's because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye see, in the eye of the
rigging."
"What's the old man have so much to do with him for?"
"Striking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose."
"Bargain?—about what?"
"Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and the devil there is trying to
come round him, and get him to swap away his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort,
and then he'll surrender Moby Dick."
"Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?"
"I don't know, Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked one, I tell ye. Why, they say as
how he went a sauntering into the old flag-ship once, switching his tail about devilish easy and
gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at home. Well, he was at home, and asked the
devil what he wanted. The devil, switching his hoofs, up and says, 'I want John.' 'What for?' says the
old governor. 'What business is that of yours,' says the devil, getting mad,—'I want to use him.'
'Take him,' says the governor—and by the Lord, Flask, if the devil didn't give John the Asiatic
cholera before he got through with him, I'll eat this whale in one mouthful. But look sharp—ain't you
all ready there? Well, then, pull ahead, and let's get the whale alongside."
"I think I remember some such story as you were telling," said Flask, when at last the two boats
were slowly advancing with their burden towards the ship, "but I can't remember where."
"Three Spaniards? Adventures of those three bloody-minded soladoes? Did ye read it there,
Flask? I guess ye did?"
"No: never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me, Stubb, do you suppose that
that devil you was speaking of just now, was the same you say is now on board the Pequod?"
"Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn't the devil live for ever; who ever heard
that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any parson a wearing mourning for the devil? And if the
devil has a latch-key to get into the admiral's cabin, don't you suppose he can crawl into a
porthole? Tell me that, Mr. Flask?"
"How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?"
"Do you see that mainmast there?" pointing to the ship; "well, that's the figure one; now take all
the hoops in the Pequod's hold, and string along in a row with that mast, for oughts, do you see;
well, that wouldn't begin to be Fedallah's age. Nor all the coopers in creation couldn't show hoops
enough to make oughts enough."
"But see here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that you meant to give Fedallah a
sea-toss, if you got a good chance. Now, if he's so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if
he is going to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard—tell me that?
"Give him a good ducking, anyhow."
"But he'd crawl back."
"Duck him again; and keep ducking him."
"Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though—yes, and drown you—what then?"
"I should like to see him try it; I'd give him such a pair of black eyes that he wouldn't dare to show
his face in the admiral's cabin again for a long while, let alone down in the orlop there, where he
lives, and hereabouts on the upper decks where he sneaks so much. Damn the devil, Flask; so you
suppose I'm afraid of the devil? Who's afraid of him, except the old governor who daresn't catch
him and put him in double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about kidnapping people; aye,
and signed a bond with him, that all the people the devil kidnapped, he'd roast for him? There's a
governor!"
"Do you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?"
"Do I suppose it? You'll know it before long, Flask. But I am going now to keep a sharp look-out
on him; and if I see anything very suspicious going on, I'll just take him by the nape of his neck, and
say—Look here, Beelzebub, you don't do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord I'll make a grab
into his pocket for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give him such a wrenching and heaving, that
his tail will come short off at the stump—do you see; and then, I rather guess when he finds himself
docked in that queer fashion, he'll sneak off without the poor satisfaction of feeling his tail between
his legs."
"And what will you do with the tail, Stubb?"
"Do with it? Sell it for an ox whip when we get home;—what else?"
"Now, do you mean what you say, and have been saying all along, Stubb?"
"Mean or not mean, here we are at the ship."
The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where fluke chains and other
necessaries were already prepared for securing him.
"Didn't I tell you so?" said Flask; "yes, you'll soon see this right whale's head hoisted up opposite
that parmacetti's."
In good time, Flask's saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the
sperm whale's head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel; though
sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over
that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor
plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads
overboard, and then you will float light and right.
In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the ship, the same preliminary
proceedings commonly take place as in the case of a sperm whale; only, in the latter instance, the
head is cut off whole, but in the former the lips and tongue are separately removed and hoisted on
deck, with all the well known black bone attached to what is called the crown-piece. But nothing
like this, in the present case, had been done. The carcases of both whales had dropped astern;
and the head-laden ship not a little resembled a mule carrying a pair of overburdening panniers.
Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale's head, and ever and anon glancing from
the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the
Parsee occupied his shadow; while, if the Parsee's shadow was there at all it seemed only to
blend with, and lengthen Ahab's. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish speculations were bandied
among them, concerning all these passing things.
CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale's Head—Contrasted View.
Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and lay together
our own.
Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale are by far the most
noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the
two extremes of all the known varieties of the whale. As the external difference between them is
mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this moment hanging from the
Pequod's side; and as we may freely go from one to the other, by merely stepping across the deck:
—where, I should like to know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than here?
In the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these heads. Both are massive
enough in all conscience; but there is a certain mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale's
which the Right Whale's sadly lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale's head. As you
behold it, you involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point of pervading dignity. In the
present instance, too, this dignity is heightened by the pepper and salt colour of his head at the
summit, giving token of advanced age and large experience. In short, he is what the fishermen
technically call a "grey-headed whale."
Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads—namely, the two most important organs,
the eye and the ear. Far back on the side of the head, and low down, near the angle of either
whale's jaw, if you narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, which you would fancy to be
a young colt's eye; so out of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the head.
Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale's eyes, it is plain that he can never see an
object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of
the whale's eyes corresponds to that of a man's ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how it would
fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears. You would find that you could only
command some thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight; and about
thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in
broad day, you would not be able to see him, any more than if he were stealing upon you from
behind. In a word, you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts
(side fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man—what, indeed, but his eyes?
Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so planted as
imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one picture and not two to the brain; the
peculiar position of the whale's eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid
head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of
course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale,
therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while
all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look
out on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with the whale, these
two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view.
This peculiarity of the whale's eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be
remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.
A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this visual matter as touching
the Leviathan. But I must be content with a hint. So long as a man's eyes are open in the light, the
act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever objects are
before him. Nevertheless, any one's experience will teach him, that though he can take in an
undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and
completely, to examine any two things—however large or however small—at one and the same
instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side and touch each other. But if you now come to
separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to
see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly
excluded from your contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his
eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive,
combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two
distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he
can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the
demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity
in this comparison.
It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of
movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to
queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless
perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must
involve them.
But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an entire stranger to their race,
you might hunt over these two heads for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no
external leaf whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so wondrously minute is
it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With respect to their ears, this important difference is to be
observed between the sperm whale and the right. While the ear of the former has an external
opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered over with a membrane, so as to be quite
imperceptible from without.
Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye,
and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as
the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would
that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to
"enlarge" your mind? Subtilize it.
Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant over the sperm
whale's head, that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending by a ladder to the summit, have a peep
down the mouth; and were it not that the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern
we might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But let us hold on here
by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth!
from floor to ceiling, lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal
satins.
But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems like the long narrow lid of
an immense snuff-box, with the hinge at one end, instead of one side. If you pry it up, so as to get it
overhead, and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and such, alas! it proves to
many a poor wight in the fishery, upon whom these spikes fall with impaling force. But far more
terrible is it to behold, when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there
suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging straight down at right-angles
with his body, for all the world like a ship's jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited;
out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw have relaxed,
leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt,
imprecate lock-jaws upon him.
In most cases this lower jaw—being easily unhinged by a practised artist—is disengaged and
hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard
white whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles, including canes,
umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips.
With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an anchor; and when the
proper time comes—some few days after the other work—Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego,
being all accomplished dentists, are set to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg
lances the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being rigged from aloft, they
drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag stumps of old oaks out of wild wood lands. There are
generally forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled after our
artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and piled away like joists for building
houses.
 CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale's Head—Contrasted View.
Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale's head.
As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale's head may be compared to a Roman war-chariot
(especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded); so, at a broad view, the Right Whale's head
bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an
old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker's last. And in this same last or shoe,
that old woman of the nursery tale, with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she
and all her progeny.
But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different aspects, according to
your point of view. If you stand on its summit and look at these two F-shaped spoutholes, you
would take the whole head for an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in its
sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange, crested, comb-like incrustation
on the top of the mass—this green, barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the "crown," and
the Southern fishers the "bonnet" of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes solely on this, you would take
the head for the trunk of some huge oak, with a bird's nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch
those live crabs that nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost sure to occur to you;
unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the technical term "crown" also bestowed upon it; in
which case you will take great interest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a diademed
king of the sea, whose green crown has been put together for him in this marvellous manner. But if
this whale be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that hanging
lower lip! what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter's measurement, about
twenty feet long and five feet deep; a sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and
more.
A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The fissure is about a foot
across. Probably the mother during an important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast,
when earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now
slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an
Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet high,
and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed,
arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of
whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or
crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned. The
edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water,
and in whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through the seas of
brit in feeding time. In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order, there are
certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the
creature's age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the certainty of this criterion is far
from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we
must grant a far greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable.
In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies concerning these blinds.
One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous "whiskers" inside of the whale's mouth;* another,
"hogs' bristles"; a third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language: "There are
about two hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his upper CHOP, which arch over his
tongue on each side of his mouth."
*This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or rather a moustache,
consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper part of the outer end of the lower jaw.
Sometimes these tufts impart a rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn
countenance.
As every one knows, these same "hogs' bristles," "fins," "whiskers," "blinds," or whatever you
please, furnish to the ladies their busks and other stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the
demand has long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne's time that the bone was in its glory,
the farthingale being then all the fashion. And as those ancient dames moved about gaily, though in
the jaws of the whale, as you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like thoughtlessness, do we
nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the umbrella being a tent spread over the same
bone.
But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing in the Right Whale's
mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged
about, would you not think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its
thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest Turkey—the tongue, which
is glued, as it were, to the floor of the mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in
hoisting it on deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I should say it was a
six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that amount of oil.
Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started with—that the Sperm Whale and
the Right Whale have almost entirely different heads. To sum up, then: in the Right Whale's there is
no great well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a lower jaw, like the
Sperm Whale's. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any of those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip;
and scarcely anything of a tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm
Whale only one.
Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie together; for one will
soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will not be very long in following.
Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's there? It is the same he died with, only
some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full
of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark the other head's
expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel's side, so as firmly
to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution
in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who
might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.
 CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.
Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale's head, I would have you, as a sensible
physiologist, simply—particularly remark its front aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I
would have you investigate it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some unexaggerated,
intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may be lodged there. Here is a vital point; for
you must either satisfactorily settle this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one
of the most appalling, but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be found in all recorded
history.
You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale, the front of his head
presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the water; you observe that the lower part of that front
slopes considerably backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which
receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely under the head, much in
the same way, indeed, as though your own mouth were entirely under your chin. Moreover you
observe that the whale has no external nose; and that what nose he has—his spout hole—is on the
top of his head; you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides of his head, nearly one third of
his entire length from the front. Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm
Whale's head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort
whatsoever. Furthermore, you are now to consider that only in the extreme, lower, backward
sloping part of the front of the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone; and not till you get near
twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the full cranial development. So that this whole
enormous boneless mass is as one wad. Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents
partly comprise the most delicate oil; yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of the
substance which so impregnably invests all that apparent effeminacy. In some previous place I
have described to you how the blubber wraps the body of the whale, as the rind wraps an orange.
Just so with the head; but with this difference: about the head this envelope, though not so thick, is
of a boneless toughness, inestimable by any man who has not handled it. The severest pointed
harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by the strongest human arm, impotently rebounds from it. It is
as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved with horses' hoofs. I do not think that any
sensation lurks in it.
Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded Indiamen chance to crowd and
crush towards each other in the docks, what do the sailors do? They do not suspend between
them, at the point of coming contact, any merely hard substance, like iron or wood. No, they hold
there a large, round wad of tow and cork, enveloped in the thickest and toughest of ox-hide. That
bravely and uninjured takes the jam which would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron
crow-bars. By itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive at. But supplementary to this, it
has hypothetically occurred to me, that as ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder
in them, capable, at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale, as far as I know,
has no such provision in him; considering, too, the otherwise inexplicable manner in which he now
depresses his head altogether beneath the surface, and anon swims with it high elevated out of
the water; considering the unobstructed elasticity of its envelope; considering the unique interior of
his head; it has hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical lung-celled honeycombs
there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so
as to be susceptible to atmospheric distension and contraction. If this be so, fancy the
irresistibleness of that might, to which the most impalpable and destructive of all elements
contributes.
Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable wall, and this most buoyant
thing within; there swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated
as piled wood is—by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest insect. So that when
I shall hereafter detail to you all the specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking
in this expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable braining feats; I
trust you will have renounced all ignorant incredulity, and be ready to abide by this; that though the
Sperm Whale stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the
Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow. For unless you own the whale, you are but
a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to
encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then? What befell the weakling youth lifting the
dread goddess's veil at Lais?
 CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
Now comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must know something of
the curious internal structure of the thing operated upon.
Regarding the Sperm Whale's head as a solid oblong, you may, on an inclined plane, sideways
divide it into two quoins,* whereof the lower is the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws,
and the upper an unctuous mass wholly free from bones; its broad forward end forming the
expanded vertical apparent forehead of the whale. At the middle of the forehead horizontally
subdivide this upper quoin, and then you have two almost equal parts, which before were naturally
divided by an internal wall of a thick tendinous substance.
*Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical mathematics. I know not that it has
been defined before. A quoin is a solid which differs from a wedge in having its sharp end formed
by the steep inclination of one side, instead of the mutual tapering of both sides.
The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of oil, formed by the
crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout
its whole extent. The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh
Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as that famous great tierce is mystically carved in front, so the
whale's vast plaited forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematical adornment
of his wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished with the most
excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun of the whale contains by far the most
precious of all his oily vintages; namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid,
and odoriferous state. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed in any other part of the
creature. Though in life it remains perfectly fluid, yet, upon exposure to the air, after death, it soon
begins to concrete; sending forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the first thin delicate ice is
just forming in water. A large whale's case generally yields about five hundred gallons of sperm,
though from unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it is spilled, leaks, and dribbles away, or
is otherwise irrevocably lost in the ticklish business of securing what you can.
I know not with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun was coated within, but in
superlative richness that coating could not possibly have compared with the silken pearl-coloured
membrane, like the lining of a fine pelisse, forming the inner surface of the Sperm Whale's case.
It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale embraces the entire length
of the entire top of the head; and since—as has been elsewhere set forth—the head embraces
one third of the whole length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty feet for a good
sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for the depth of the tun, when it is lengthwise
hoisted up and down against a ship's side.
As in decapitating the whale, the operator's instrument is brought close to the spot where an
entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti magazine; he has, therefore, to be
uncommonly heedful, lest a careless, untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let
out its invaluable contents. It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which is at last elevated out
of the water, and retained in that position by the enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen
combinations, on one side, make quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter.
Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and—in this particular instance
—almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm Whale's great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.
 CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.
Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect posture, runs straight out
upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the part where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He
has carried with him a light tackle called a whip, consisting of only two parts, travelling through a
single-sheaved block. Securing this block, so that it hangs down from the yard-arm, he swings one
end of the rope, till it is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck. Then, hand-over-hand, down the
other part, the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he lands on the summit of the head.
There—still high elevated above the rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries—he seems
some Turkish Muezzin calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A short-handled
sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches for the proper place to begin breaking
into the Tun. In this business he proceeds very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house,
sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time this cautious search is over, a
stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like a well-bucket, has been attached to one end of the whip;
while the other end, being stretched across the deck, is there held by two or three alert hands.
These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of the Indian, to whom another person has reached up
a very long pole. Inserting this pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket into the
Tun, till it entirely disappears; then giving the word to the seamen at the whip, up comes the bucket
again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid's pail of new milk. Carefully lowered from its height, the full-
freighted vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a large tub. Then
remounting aloft, it again goes through the same round until the deep cistern will yield no more.
Towards the end, Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper and deeper
into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the pole have gone down.
Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way; several tubs had been
filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at once a queer accident happened. Whether it was that
Tashtego, that wild Indian, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed
hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the place where he stood was
so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil One himself would have it to fall out so, without stating
his particular reasons; how it was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth
or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up—my God! poor Tashtego—like the twin reciprocating bucket
in a veritable well, dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a
horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!
"Man overboard!" cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation first came to his senses.
"Swing the bucket this way!" and putting one foot into it, so as the better to secure his slippery
hand-hold on the whip itself, the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head, almost before
Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. Meantime, there was a terrible tumult. Looking
over the side, they saw the before lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the
sea, as if that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only the poor Indian
unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous depth to which he had sunk.
At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearing the whip—which had
somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles—a sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the
unspeakable horror of all, one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with
a vast vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship reeled and shook as if
smitten by an iceberg. The one remaining hook, upon which the entire strain now depended,
seemed every instant to be on the point of giving way; an event still more likely from the violent
motions of the head.
"Come down, come down!" yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one hand holding on to the
heavy tackles, so that if the head should drop, he would still remain suspended; the negro having
cleared the foul line, rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the buried
harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out.
"In heaven's name, man," cried Stubb, "are you ramming home a cartridge there?—Avast! How
will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket on top of his head? Avast, will ye!"
"Stand clear of the tackle!" cried a voice like the bursting of a rocket.
Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass dropped into the sea, like
Niagara's Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down
her glittering copper; and all caught their breath, as half swinging—now over the sailors' heads,
and now over the water—Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray, was dimly beheld clinging to the
pendulous tackles, while poor, buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the
sea! But hardly had the blinding vapour cleared away, when a naked figure with a boarding-sword
in his hand, was for one swift moment seen hovering over the bulwarks. The next, a loud splash
announced that my brave Queequeg had dived to the rescue. One packed rush was made to the
side, and every eye counted every ripple, as moment followed moment, and no sign of either the
sinker or the diver could be seen. Some hands now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed a
little off from the ship.
"Ha! ha!" cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging perch overhead; and looking
further off from the side, we saw an arm thrust upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see,
as an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave.
"Both! both!—it is both!"—cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout; and soon after, Queequeg
was seen boldly striking out with one hand, and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian.
Drawn into the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego was long in
coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.
Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the slowly descending
head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a
large hole there; then dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards, and so
hauled out poor Tash by the head. He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a leg was
presented; but well knowing that that was not as it ought to be, and might occasion great trouble;
—he had thrust back the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon
the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way—head foremost. As for the
great head itself, that was doing as well as could be expected.
And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the deliverance, or
rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward
and apparently hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten. Midwifery
should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing.
I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header's will be sure to seem incredible to some
landsmen, though they themselves may have either seen or heard of some one's falling into a
cistern ashore; an accident which not seldom happens, and with much less reason too than the
Indian's, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb of the Sperm Whale's well.
But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought the tissued, infiltrated
head of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and most corky part about him; and yet thou makest it
sink in an element of a far greater specific gravity than itself. We have thee there. Not at all, but I
have ye; for at the time poor Tash fell in, the case had been nearly emptied of its lighter contents,
leaving little but the dense tendinous wall of the well—a double welded, hammered substance, as I
have before said, much heavier than the sea water, and a lump of which sinks in it like lead almost.
But the tendency to rapid sinking in this substance was in the present instance materially
counteracted by the other parts of the head remaining undetached from it, so that it sank very
slowly and deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair chance for performing his agile
obstetrics on the run, as you may say. Yes, it was a running delivery, so it was.
Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious perishing; smothered in
the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret
inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled
—the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree,
found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died
embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and sweetly perished
there?
 CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.
To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this Leviathan; this is a thing which
no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would seem almost
as hopeful as for Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar, or for Gall to
have mounted a ladder and manipulated the Dome of the Pantheon. Still, in that famous work of
his, Lavater not only treats of the various faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces of
horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the modifications of expression
discernible therein. Nor have Gall and his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints
touching the phrenological characteristics of other beings than man. Therefore, though I am but ill
qualified for a pioneer, in the application of these two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my
endeavor. I try all things; I achieve what I can.
Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature. He has no proper
nose. And since the nose is the central and most conspicuous of the features; and since it perhaps
most modifies and finally controls their combined expression; hence it would seem that its entire
absence, as an external appendage, must very largely affect the countenance of the whale. For as
in landscape gardening, a spire, cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost
indispensable to the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in keeping
without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the nose from Phidias's marble Jove, and
what a sorry remainder! Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions
are so stately, that the same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were hideous, in him is no
blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have been impertinent. As
on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast head in your jolly-boat, your noble
conceptions of him are never insulted by the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent
conceit, which so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal beadle
on his throne.
In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to be had of the Sperm
Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This aspect is sublime.
In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the morning. In the repose of the
pasture, the curled brow of the bull has a touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon up
mountain defiles, the elephant's brow is majestic. Human or animal, the mystical brow is as that
great golden seal affixed by the German Emperors to their decrees. It signifies—"God: done this
day by my hand." But in most creatures, nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip
of alpine land lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which like Shakespeare's or
Melancthon's rise so high, and descend so low, that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal,
tideless mountain lakes; and all above them in the forehead's wrinkles, you seem to track the
antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the snow prints of the
deer. But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so
immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread
powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one point
precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none,
proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering
with the doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow diminish;
though that way viewed its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you plainly perceive
that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the forehead's middle, which, in man, is Lavater's
mark of genius.
But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a
speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover
declared in his pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been
known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts. They
deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has
no tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any
highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old;
and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure,
exalted to Jove's high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.
Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to
decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human
science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not
read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered
Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before
you. Read it if you can.
 CHAPTER 80. The Nut.
If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain seems that
geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.
In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet in length. Unhinge the lower
jaw, and the side view of this skull is as the side of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout
on a level base. But in life—as we have elsewhere seen—this inclined plane is angularly filled up,
and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end
the skull forms a crater to bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of this crater—in
another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many in depth—reposes the mere
handful of this monster's brain. The brain is at least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it
is hidden away behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the amplified fortifications
of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it secreted in him, that I have known some whalemen who
peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale has any other brain than that palpable semblance of one
formed by the cubic-yards of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange folds, courses, and
convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more in keeping with the idea of his general might
to regard that mystic part of him as the seat of his intelligence.
It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in the creature's living intact state,
is an entire delusion. As for his true brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The
whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world.
If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view of its rear end, which is the
high end, you will be struck by its resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation,
and from the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down to the human
magnitude) among a plate of men's skulls, and you would involuntarily confound it with them; and
remarking the depressions on one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say—This
man had no self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations, considered along with the
affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and power, you can best form to yourself the truest, though
not the most exhilarating conception of what the most exalted potency is.
But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale's proper brain, you deem it incapable of
being adequately charted, then I have another idea for you. If you attentively regard almost any
quadruped's spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of
dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper. It is a German conceit, that
the vertebrae are absolutely undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I take it the
Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign friend once pointed it out to me, in the
skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with the vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-
relievo, the beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have omitted an
important thing in not pushing their investigations from the cerebellum through the spinal canal. For
I believe that much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather
feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and
noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the
world.
Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial cavity is continuous with
the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches
across, being eight in height, and of a triangular figure with the base downwards. As it passes
through the remaining vertebrae the canal tapers in size, but for a considerable distance remains
of large capacity. Now, of course, this canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous
substance—the spinal cord—as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain. And what is
still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain's cavity, the spinal cord remains of an
undecreasing girth, almost equal to that of the brain. Under all these circumstances, would it be
unreasonable to survey and map out the whale's spine phrenologically? For, viewed in this light, the
wonderful comparative smallness of his brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful
comparative magnitude of his spinal cord.
But leaving this hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I would merely assume the spinal
theory for a moment, in reference to the Sperm Whale's hump. This august hump, if I mistake not,
rises over one of the larger vertebrae, and is, therefore, in some sort, the outer convex mould of it.
From its relative situation then, I should call this high hump the organ of firmness or
indomitableness in the Sperm Whale. And that the great monster is indomitable, you will yet have
reason to know.
 CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
The predestinated day arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick De Deer, master, of
Bremen.
At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and Germans are now among
the least; but here and there at very wide intervals of latitude and longitude, you still occasionally
meet with their flag in the Pacific.
For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her respects. While yet some
distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and dropping a boat, her captain was impelled towards
us, impatiently standing in the bows instead of the stern.
"What has he in his hand there?" cried Starbuck, pointing to something wavingly held by the
German. "Impossible!—a lamp-feeder!"
"Not that," said Stubb, "no, no, it's a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he's coming off to make us our
coffee, is the Yarman; don't you see that big tin can there alongside of him?—that's his boiling
water. Oh! he's all right, is the Yarman."
"Go along with you," cried Flask, "it's a lamp-feeder and an oil-can. He's out of oil, and has
come a-begging."
However curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the whale-ground, and
however much it may invertedly contradict the old proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet
sometimes such a thing really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer did
indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.
As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all heeding what he had in his
hand; but in his broken lingo, the German soon evinced his complete ignorance of the White
Whale; immediately turning the conversation to his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some remarks
touching his having to turn into his hammock at night in profound darkness—his last drop of
Bremen oil being gone, and not a single flying-fish yet captured to supply the deficiency;
concluding by hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is technically called a CLEAN
one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the name of Jungfrau or the Virgin.
His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his ship's side, when whales
were almost simultaneously raised from the mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the
chase was Derick, that without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed
round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders.
Now, the game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German boats that soon followed
him, had considerably the start of the Pequod's keels. There were eight whales, an average pod.
Aware of their danger, they were going all abreast with great speed straight before the wind,
rubbing their flanks as closely as so many spans of horses in harness. They left a great, wide
wake, as though continually unrolling a great wide parchment upon the sea.
Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge, humped old bull, which by
his comparatively slow progress, as well as by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing
him, seemed afflicted with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this whale belonged to the
pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it is not customary for such venerable leviathans to be
at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck to their wake, though indeed their back water must have
retarded him, because the white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one, like the
swell formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout was short, slow, and laborious; coming
forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in torn shreds, followed by strange
subterranean commotions in him, which seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity,
causing the waters behind him to upbubble.
 "Who's got some paregoric?" said Stubb, "he has the stomach-ache, I'm afraid. Lord, think of
having half an acre of stomach-ache! Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It's
the first foul wind I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so before? it must
be, he's lost his tiller."
As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck load of frightened
horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her way; so did this old whale heave his aged bulk,
and now and then partly turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious
wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin. Whether he had lost that fin in battle, or had been
born without it, it were hard to say.
"Only wait a bit, old chap, and I'll give ye a sling for that wounded arm," cried cruel Flask,
pointing to the whale-line near him.
"Mind he don't sling thee with it," cried Starbuck. "Give way, or the German will have him."
With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this one fish, because not only was
he the largest, and therefore the most valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other
whales were going with such great velocity, moreover, as almost to defy pursuit for the time. At this
juncture the Pequod's keels had shot by the three German boats last lowered; but from the great
start he had had, Derick's boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by his foreign
rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from being already so nigh to his mark, he would be
enabled to dart his iron before they could completely overtake and pass him. As for Derick, he
seemed quite confident that this would be the case, and occasionally with a deriding gesture
shook his lamp-feeder at the other boats.
"The ungracious and ungrateful dog!" cried Starbuck; "he mocks and dares me with the very
poor-box I filled for him not five minutes ago!"—then in his old intense whisper—"Give way,
greyhounds! Dog to it!"
"I tell ye what it is, men"—cried Stubb to his crew—"it's against my religion to get mad; but I'd
like to eat that villainous Yarman—Pull—won't ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do ye
love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best man. Come, why don't some of ye burst a
blood-vessel? Who's that been dropping an anchor overboard—we don't budge an inch—we're
becalmed. Halloo, here's grass growing in the boat's bottom—and by the Lord, the mast there's
budding. This won't do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long of it is, men, will ye spit fire
or not?"
"Oh! see the suds he makes!" cried Flask, dancing up and down—"What a hump—Oh, DO pile
on the beef—lays like a log! Oh! my lads, DO spring—slap-jacks and quahogs for supper, you
know, my lads—baked clams and muffins—oh, DO, DO, spring,—he's a hundred barreller—don't
lose him now—don't oh, DON'T!—see that Yarman—Oh, won't ye pull for your duff, my lads—such
a sog! such a sogger! Don't ye love sperm? There goes three thousand dollars, men!—a bank!—a
whole bank! The bank of England!—Oh, DO, DO, DO!—What's that Yarman about now?"
At this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder at the advancing boats, and
also his oil-can; perhaps with the double view of retarding his rivals' way, and at the same time
economically accelerating his own by the momentary impetus of the backward toss.
"The unmannerly Dutch dogger!" cried Stubb. "Pull now, men, like fifty thousand line-of-battle-
ship loads of red-haired devils. What d'ye say, Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in
two-and-twenty pieces for the honour of old Gayhead? What d'ye say?"
"I say, pull like god-dam,"—cried the Indian.
Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the Pequod's three boats now began
ranging almost abreast; and, so disposed, momentarily neared him. In that fine, loose, chivalrous
attitude of the headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three mates stood up proudly,
occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating cry of, "There she slides, now! Hurrah
for the white-ash breeze! Down with the Yarman! Sail over him!"
 But so decided an original start had Derick had, that spite of all their gallantry, he would have
proved the victor in this race, had not a righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which
caught the blade of his midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving to free his white-
ash, and while, in consequence, Derick's boat was nigh to capsizing, and he thundering away at
his men in a mighty rage;—that was a good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a shout, they
took a mortal start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German's quarter. An instant more,
and all four boats were diagonically in the whale's immediate wake, while stretching from them, on
both sides, was the foaming swell that he made.
It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was now going head out, and
sending his spout before him in a continual tormented jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an
agony of fright. Now to this hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight, and still at every billow
that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the sea, or sideways rolled towards the sky his one
beating fin. So have I seen a bird with clipped wing making affrighted broken circles in the air,
vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird has a voice, and with plaintive cries will
make known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and
enchanted in him; he had no voice, save that choking respiration through his spiracle, and this
made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and
omnipotent tail, there was enough to appal the stoutest man who so pitied.
Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod's boats the advantage,
and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick chose to hazard what to him must have seemed
a most unusually long dart, ere the last chance would for ever escape.
But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all three tigers—Queequeg,
Tashtego, Daggoo—instinctively sprang to their feet, and standing in a diagonal row,
simultaneously pointed their barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their
three Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapours of foam and white-fire! The three boats,
in the first fury of the whale's headlong rush, bumped the German's aside with such force, that both
Derick and his baffled harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the three flying keels.
"Don't be afraid, my butter-boxes," cried Stubb, casting a passing glance upon them as he shot
by; "ye'll be picked up presently—all right—I saw some sharks astern—St. Bernard's dogs, you
know—relieve distressed travellers. Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. Every keel a sunbeam!
Hurrah!—Here we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a mad cougar! This puts me in mind of
fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on a plain—makes the wheel-spokes fly, boys, when you fasten
to him that way; and there's danger of being pitched out too, when you strike a hill. Hurrah! this is
the way a fellow feels when he's going to Davy Jones—all a rush down an endless inclined plane!
Hurrah! this whale carries the everlasting mail!"
But the monster's run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously sounded. With a
grating rush, the three lines flew round the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep
grooves in them; while so fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding would soon
exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might, they caught repeated smoking turns with the
rope to hold on; till at last—owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of the
boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into the blue—the gunwales of the bows were
almost even with the water, while the three sterns tilted high in the air. And the whale soon ceasing
to sound, for some time they remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more line, though the
position was a little ticklish. But though boats have been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is
this "holding on," as it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh from the back;
this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes.
Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is always the best;
for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the stricken whale stays under water, the more
he is exhausted. Because, owing to the enormous surface of him—in a full grown sperm whale
something less than 2000 square feet—the pressure of the water is immense. We all know what
an astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here, above-ground, in the
air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on his back a column of two hundred fathoms of
ocean! It must at least equal the weight of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated it at the
weight of twenty line-of-battle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on board.
As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and
as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its
depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost
monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope
were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was
suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of
board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said—"Canst thou fill his skin with
barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the
spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee;
darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!" This the creature? this he?
Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his
tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod's fish-
spears!
In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the
surface, must have been long enough and broad enough to shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell
how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!
"Stand by, men; he stirs," cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly vibrated in the water,
distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale,
so that every oarsman felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in great part from the
downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a small icefield will,
when a dense herd of white bears are scared from it into the sea.
"Haul in! Haul in!" cried Starbuck again; "he's rising."
The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand's breadth could have been gained,
were now in long quick coils flung back all dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water
within two ship's lengths of the hunters.
His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals there are certain
valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree
at least instantly shut off in certain directions. Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities it is
to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so that when pierced even by so small
a point as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system; and when
this is heightened by the extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance below the surface, his
life may be said to pour from him in incessant streams. Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in him,
and so distant and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for
a considerable period; even as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the well-springs of
far-off and undiscernible hills. Even now, when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously
drew over his swaying flukes, and the lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady
jets from the new made wound, which kept continually playing, while the natural spout-hole in his
head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending its affrighted moisture into the air. From this last
vent no blood yet came, because no vital part of him had thus far been struck. His life, as they
significantly call it, was untouched.
As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it
that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes
had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest oaks
when prostrate, so from the points which the whale's eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind
bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his
blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other
merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional
inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely
discoloured bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank.
"A nice spot," cried Flask; "just let me prick him there once."
 "Avast!" cried Starbuck, "there's no need of that!"
But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel
wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood,
with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with
showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this
time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made;
lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved
like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most
piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from
some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and
lowers to the ground—so the last long dying spout of the whale.
Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body showed symptoms of
sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately, by Starbuck's orders, lines were secured to it at
different points, so that ere long every boat was a buoy; the sunken whale being suspended a few
inches beneath them by the cords. By very heedful management, when the ship drew nigh, the
whale was transferred to her side, and was strongly secured there by the stiffest fluke-chains, for it
was plain that unless artificially upheld, the body would at once sink to the bottom.
It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade, the entire length of a
corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on the lower part of the bunch before
described. But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured
whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any kind to denote their
place; therefore, there must needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully
to account for the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a lance-head of stone
being found in him, not far from the buried iron, the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that
stone lance? And when? It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before America
was discovered.
What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous cabinet there is no telling.
But a sudden stop was put to further discoveries, by the ship's being unprecedentedly dragged
over sideways to the sea, owing to the body's immensely increasing tendency to sink. However,
Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the last; hung on to it so resolutely,
indeed, that when at length the ship would have been capsized, if still persisting in locking arms
with the body; then, when the command was given to break clear from it, such was the immovable
strain upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and cables were fastened, that it was
impossible to cast them off. Meantime everything in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the other
side of the deck was like walking up the steep gabled roof of a house. The ship groaned and
gasped. Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started from their places, by
the unnatural dislocation. In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable
fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so low had the whale now settled that the
submerged ends could not be at all approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity
seemed added to the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going over.
"Hold on, hold on, won't ye?" cried Stubb to the body, "don't be in such a devil of a hurry to sink!
By thunder, men, we must do something or go for it. No use prying there; avast, I say with your
handspikes, and run one of ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut the big chains."
"Knife? Aye, aye," cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter's heavy hatchet, he leaned out of
a porthole, and steel to iron, began slashing at the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes, full of
sparks, were given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest. With a terrific snap, every
fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank.
Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm Whale is a very curious thing;
nor has any fisherman yet adequately accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with
great buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the surface. If the only whales
that thus sank were old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and
all their bones heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that this sinking is
caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so sinking, consequent upon this absence of
buoyant matter in him. But it is not so. For young whales, in the highest health, and swelling with
noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of life, with all their panting lard
about them; even these brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink.
Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this accident than any other
species. Where one of that sort go down, twenty Right Whales do. This difference in the species is
no doubt imputable in no small degree to the greater quantity of bone in the Right Whale; his
Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a ton; from this incumbrance the Sperm
Whale is wholly free. But there are instances where, after the lapse of many hours or several days,
the sunken whale again rises, more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this is obvious. Gases
are generated in him; he swells to a prodigious magnitude; becomes a sort of animal balloon. A
line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then. In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among
the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him,
with plenty of rope; so that when the body has gone down, they know where to look for it when it
shall have ascended again.
It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from the Pequod's mast-heads,
announcing that the Jungfrau was again lowering her boats; though the only spout in sight was that
of a Fin-Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its incredible power
of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back's spout is so similar to the Sperm Whale's, that by
unskilful fishermen it is often mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were now in
valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail, made after her four young
keels, and thus they all disappeared far to leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase.
Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.
 CHAPTER 82. The Honour and Glory of Whaling.
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head
of it so much the more am I impressed with its great honourableness and antiquity; and especially
when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have
shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but
subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.
The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the eternal honour of our
calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid
intent. Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the
distressed, and not to fill men's lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and
Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-
coast, and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen,
intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered and married the maid. It was an
admirable artistic exploit, rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as
this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the
ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many
ages the vast skeleton of a whale, which the city's legends and all the inhabitants asserted to be
the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When the Romans took Joppa, the same
skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively important in
this story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.
Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda—indeed, by some supposed to be indirectly
derived from it—is that famous story of St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to
have been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together,
and often stand for each other. "Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea," saith
Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself.
Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but encountered a
crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle with the great monster of the deep. Any man
may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly
up to a whale.
Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the creature encountered by
that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is
depicted on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of those times,
when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists; and considering that as in Perseus' case,
St. George's whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the
animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in
mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts
of the scene, to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In fact, placed
before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the
Philistines, Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and both
the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of him remained. Thus,
then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by
good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St.
George. And therefore, let not the knights of that honourable company (none of whom, I venture to
say, have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with
disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are much better entitled to St.
George's decoration than they.
Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long remained dubious: for though
according to the Greek mythologies, that antique Crockett and Kit Carson—that brawny doer of
rejoicing good deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that strictly
makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he ever actually
harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of
involuntary whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I claim him for one
of our clan.
But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of Hercules and the whale is
considered to be derived from the still more ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and
vice versa; certainly they are very similar. If I claim the demigod then, why not the prophet?
Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll of our order. Our
grand master is still to be named; for like royal kings of old times, we find the head waters of our
fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now to be
rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the
godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord;—Vishnoo, who, by the
first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale. When Brahma,
or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical
dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books,
whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation,
and which therefore must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young
architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a
whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not
this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?
Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll for you! What club
but the whaleman's can head off like that?
 CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.
Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the preceding chapter.
Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical story of Jonah and the whale. But then there
were some sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans of their
times, equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin; and yet their
doubting those traditions did not make those traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.
One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the Hebrew story was this:—He
had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of
which represented Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head—a peculiarity only true with respect
to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the varieties of that order), concerning which
the fishermen have this saying, "A penny roll would choke him"; his swallow is so very small. But, to
this, Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we
consider Jonah as tombed in the whale's belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his
mouth. And this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale's mouth
would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too,
Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is
toothless.
Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his want of faith in this
matter of the prophet, was something obscurely in reference to his incarcerated body and the
whale's gastric juices. But this objection likewise falls to the ground, because a German exegetist
supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating body of a DEAD whale—even as the
French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned their dead horses into tents, and crawled into
them. Besides, it has been divined by other continental commentators, that when Jonah was
thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his escape to another vessel near
by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head; and, I would add, possibly called "The Whale," as
some craft are nowadays christened the "Shark," the "Gull," the "Eagle." Nor have there been
wanting learned exegetists who have opined that the whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely
meant a life-preserver—an inflated bag of wind—which the endangered prophet swam to, and so
was saved from a watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But he had
still another reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the
whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he was vomited up somewhere within three
days' journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much more than three days' journey across from
the nearest point of the Mediterranean coast. How is that?
But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within that short distance of
Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him round by the way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to
speak of the passage through the whole length of the Mediterranean, and another passage up the
Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would involve the complete circumnavigation of all
Africa in three days, not to speak of the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow
for any whale to swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah's weathering the Cape of Good Hope at so
early a day would wrest the honour of the discovery of that great headland from Bartholomew Diaz,
its reputed discoverer, and so make modern history a liar.
But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his foolish pride of reason—a
thing still more reprehensible in him, seeing that he had but little learning except what he had
picked up from the sun and the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and abominable,
devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of
Jonah's going to Nineveh via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of
the general miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly enlightened Turks devoutly
believe in the historical story of Jonah. And some three centuries ago, an English traveller in old
Harris's Voyages, speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honour of Jonah, in which Mosque was a
miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.
 CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.
To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are anointed; and for much the same
purpose, some whalers perform an analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the bottom.
Nor is it to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it may possibly be of no
contemptible advantage; considering that oil and water are hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and
that the object in view is to make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing
his boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau disappeared, took more than
customary pains in that occupation; crawling under its bottom, where it hung over the side, and
rubbing in the unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from the craft's
bald keel. He seemed to be working in obedience to some particular presentiment. Nor did it
remain unwarranted by the event.
Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to them, they turned and
fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered flight, as of Cleopatra's barges from Actium.
Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb's was foremost. By great exertion, Tashtego at last
succeeded in planting one iron; but the stricken whale, without at all sounding, still continued his
horizontal flight, with added fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the planted iron must
sooner or later inevitably extract it. It became imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to
lose him. But to haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and furious. What
then remained?
Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and countless subtleties, to
which the veteran whaleman is so often forced, none exceed that fine manoeuvre with the lance
called pitchpoling. Small sword, or broad sword, in all its exercises boasts nothing like it. It is only
indispensable with an inveterate running whale; its grand fact and feature is the wonderful distance
to which the long lance is accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under extreme
headway. Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten or twelve feet in length; the staff is
much slighter than that of the harpoon, and also of a lighter material—pine. It is furnished with a
small rope called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to the hand after
darting.
But before going further, it is important to mention here, that though the harpoon may be
pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it is seldom done; and when done, is still less
frequently successful, on account of the greater weight and inferior length of the harpoon as
compared with the lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks. As a general thing, therefore,
you must first get fast to a whale, before any pitchpoling comes into play.
Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and equanimity in the
direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel in pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands upright
in the tossed bow of the flying boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is forty feet ahead.
Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice along its length to see if it be exactly
straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers up the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end
in his grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full before his waistband's
middle, he levels it at the whale; when, covering him with it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in
his hand, thereby elevating the point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his palm, fifteen
feet in the air. He minds you somewhat of a juggler, balancing a long staff on his chin. Next moment
with a rapid, nameless impulse, in a superb lofty arch the bright steel spans the foaming distance,
and quivers in the life spot of the whale. Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.
"That drove the spigot out of him!" cried Stubb. "'Tis July's immortal Fourth; all fountains must run
wine today! Would now, it were old Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old
Monongahela! Then, Tashtego, lad, I'd have ye hold a canakin to the jet, and we'd drink round it!
Yea, verily, hearts alive, we'd brew choice punch in the spread of his spout-hole there, and from
that live punch-bowl quaff the living stuff."
 Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart is repeated, the spear returning to
its master like a greyhound held in skilful leash. The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-
line is slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and mutely watches the
monster die.
 CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.
That for six thousand years—and no one knows how many millions of ages before—the great
whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the
deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of
hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and
spoutings—that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter
minutes past one o'clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851), it should still remain
a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapour—this is surely
a noteworthy thing.
Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items contingent. Every one knows
that by the peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times
is combined with the element in which they swim; hence, a herring or a cod might live a century,
and never once raise its head above the surface. But owing to his marked internal structure which
gives him regular lungs, like a human being's, the whale can only live by inhaling the disengaged
air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity for his periodical visits to the upper world. But
he cannot in any degree breathe through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm Whale's
mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface; and what is still more, his windpipe has no
connexion with his mouth. No, he breathes through his spiracle alone; and this is on the top of his
head.
If I say, that in any creature breathing is only a function indispensable to vitality, inasmuch as it
withdraws from the air a certain element, which being subsequently brought into contact with the
blood imparts to the blood its vivifying principle, I do not think I shall err; though I may possibly use
some superfluous scientific words. Assume it, and it follows that if all the blood in a man could be
aerated with one breath, he might then seal up his nostrils and not fetch another for a considerable
time. That is to say, he would then live without breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is
precisely the case with the whale, who systematically lives, by intervals, his full hour and more
(when at the bottom) without drawing a single breath, or so much as in any way inhaling a particle
of air; for, remember, he has no gills. How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of his spine
he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth of vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels,
when he quits the surface, are completely distended with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or
more, a thousand fathoms in the sea, he carries a surplus stock of vitality in him, just as the camel
crossing the waterless desert carries a surplus supply of drink for future use in its four
supplementary stomachs. The anatomical fact of this labyrinth is indisputable; and that the
supposition founded upon it is reasonable and true, seems the more cogent to me, when I
consider the otherwise inexplicable obstinacy of that leviathan in HAVING HIS SPOUTINGS OUT,
as the fishermen phrase it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising to the surface, the
Sperm Whale will continue there for a period of time exactly uniform with all his other unmolested
risings. Say he stays eleven minutes, and jets seventy times, that is, respires seventy breaths; then
whenever he rises again, he will be sure to have his seventy breaths over again, to a minute. Now,
if after he fetches a few breaths you alarm him, so that he sounds, he will be always dodging up
again to make good his regular allowance of air. And not till those seventy breaths are told, will he
finally go down to stay out his full term below. Remark, however, that in different individuals these
rates are different; but in any one they are alike. Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having
his spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere descending for good? How
obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the whale's rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the
chase. For not by hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing a thousand
fathoms beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the great necessities that
strike the victory to thee!
In man, breathing is incessantly going on—one breath only serving for two or three pulsations; so
that whatever other business he has to attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he
will. But the Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time.
 It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole; if it could truthfully be added
that his spouts are mixed with water, then I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his
sense of smell seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at all answers to his nose
is that identical spout-hole; and being so clogged with two elements, it could not be expected to
have the power of smelling. But owing to the mystery of the spout—whether it be water or whether
it be vapour—no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on this head. Sure it is, nevertheless,
that the Sperm Whale has no proper olfactories. But what does he want of them? No roses, no
violets, no Cologne-water in the sea.
Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting canal, and as that long
canal—like the grand Erie Canal—is furnished with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the
downward retention of air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice;
unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through his nose. But
then again, what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything
to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy
that the world is such an excellent listener!
Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is for the conveyance of air,
and for several feet laid along, horizontally, just beneath the upper surface of his head, and a little
to one side; this curious canal is very much like a gas-pipe laid down in a city on one side of a
street. But the question returns whether this gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words, whether
the spout of the Sperm Whale is the mere vapour of the exhaled breath, or whether that exhaled
breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth, and discharged through the spiracle. It is certain
that the mouth indirectly communicates with the spouting canal; but it cannot be proved that this is
for the purpose of discharging water through the spiracle. Because the greatest necessity for so
doing would seem to be, when in feeding he accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm Whale's
food is far beneath the surface, and there he cannot spout even if he would. Besides, if you regard
him very closely, and time him with your watch, you will find that when unmolested, there is an
undeviating rhyme between the periods of his jets and the ordinary periods of respiration.
But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out! You have seen him spout;
then declare what the spout is; can you not tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not so
easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all. And as for
this whale spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.
The central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping it; and how can you
certainly tell whether any water falls from it, when, always, when you are close enough to a whale to
get a close view of his spout, he is in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading all around him.
And if at such times you should think that you really perceived drops of moisture in the spout, how
do you know that they are not merely condensed from its vapour; or how do you know that they are
not those identical drops superficially lodged in the spout-hole fissure, which is countersunk into
the summit of the whale's head? For even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a
calm, with his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary's in the desert; even then, the whale
always carries a small basin of water on his head, as under a blazing sun you will sometimes see
a cavity in a rock filled up with rain.
Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the precise nature of the whale
spout. It will not do for him to be peering into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your
pitcher to this fountain and fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into slight contact with
the outer, vapoury shreds of the jet, which will often happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the
acridness of the thing so touching it. And I know one, who coming into still closer contact with the
spout, whether with some scientific object in view, or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off
from his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to
evade it. Another thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much doubt it, that if the jet is fairly
spouted into your eyes, it will blind you. The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to
me, is to let this deadly spout alone.
Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My hypothesis is this: that the
spout is nothing but mist. And besides other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by
considerations touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I account him
no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he is never found on
soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound.
And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho,
the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the
act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to
place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and
undulation in the atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in
deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an
additional argument for the above supposition.
And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing
through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapour, engendered by
his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapour—as you will sometimes see it—glorified by a
rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit
the clear air; they only irradiate vapour. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my
mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I
thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have
intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination
makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.
 CHAPTER 86. The Tail.
Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely plumage of
the bird that never alights; less celestial, I celebrate a tail.
Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale's tail to begin at that point of the trunk where it tapers
to about the girth of a man, it comprises upon its upper surface alone, an area of at least fifty
square feet. The compact round body of its root expands into two broad, firm, flat palms or flukes,
gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness. At the crotch or junction, these flukes
slightly overlap, then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy
between. In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in the crescentic
borders of these flukes. At its utmost expansion in the full grown whale, the tail will considerably
exceed twenty feet across.
The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut into it, and you find
that three distinct strata compose it:—upper, middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower
layers, are long and horizontal; those of the middle one, very short, and running crosswise between
the outside layers. This triune structure, as much as anything else, imparts power to the tail. To the
student of old Roman walls, the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin course of tiles
always alternating with the stone in those wonderful relics of the antique, and which undoubtedly
contribute so much to the great strength of the masonry.
But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough, the whole bulk of the
leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on
either side the loins and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and largely
contribute to their might; so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale
seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it.
Nor does this—its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful flexion of its motions;
where infantileness of ease undulates through a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions
derive their most appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it
often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.
Take away the tied tendons that all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and
its charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the linen sheet from the naked corpse of
Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the man, that seemed as a Roman
triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what robustness is
there. And whatever they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical
Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most successfully embodied; these pictures, so
destitute as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative, feminine
one of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, form the peculiar practical
virtues of his teachings.
Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether wielded in sport, or in earnest, or
in anger, whatever be the mood it be in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace.
Therein no fairy's arm can transcend it.
Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for progression; Second, when
used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping; Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.
First: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan's tail acts in a different manner from the tails
of all other sea creatures. It never wriggles. In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the
whale, his tail is the sole means of propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled forwards beneath the body, and
then rapidly sprung backwards, it is this which gives that singular darting, leaping motion to the
monster when furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by.
Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only fights another sperm whale with
his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his
tail. In striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the blow is only inflicted by the
recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed air, especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then
simply irresistible. No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Your only salvation lies in eluding it; but
if it comes sideways through the opposing water, then partly owing to the light buoyancy of the
whale boat, and the elasticity of its materials, a cracked rib or a dashed plank or two, a sort of
stitch in the side, is generally the most serious result. These submerged side blows are so often
received in the fishery, that they are accounted mere child's play. Some one strips off a frock, and
the hole is stopped.
Third: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the whale the sense of touch is
concentrated in the tail; for in this respect there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the daintiness of
the elephant's trunk. This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the action of sweeping, when in maidenly
gentleness the whale with a certain soft slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side
upon the surface of the sea; and if he feel but a sailor's whisker, woe to that sailor, whiskers and
all. What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch! Had this tail any prehensile power, I should
straightway bethink me of Darmonodes' elephant that so frequented the flower-market, and with
low salutations presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their zones. On more accounts
than one, a pity it is that the whale does not possess this prehensile virtue in his tail; for I have
heard of yet another elephant, that when wounded in the fight, curved round his trunk and extracted
the dart.
Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the middle of solitary seas,
you find him unbent from the vast corpulence of his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean
as if it were a hearth. But still you see his power in his play. The broad palms of his tail are flirted
high into the air; then smiting the surface, the thunderous concussion resounds for miles. You would
almost think a great gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light wreath of vapour from
the spiracle at his other extremity, you would think that that was the smoke from the touch-hole.
Fifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes lie considerably below the
level of his back, they are then completely out of sight beneath the surface; but when he is about to
plunge into the deeps, his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are tossed erect in the
air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime
BREACH—somewhere else to be described—this peaking of the whale's flukes is perhaps the
grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless profundities the gigantic tail
seems spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan
thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing at such
scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of
Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky
and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a
moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand
embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of the fire
worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African elephant, I then testified of the whale,
pronouncing him the most devout of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants
of antiquity often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence.
The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the elephant, so far as some
aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk of the other are concerned, should not tend to place
those two opposite organs on an equality, much less the creatures to which they respectively
belong. For as the mightiest elephant is but a terrier to Leviathan, so, compared with Leviathan's
tail, his trunk is but the stalk of a lily. The most direful blow from the elephant's trunk were as the
playful tap of a fan, compared with the measureless crush and crash of the sperm whale's
ponderous flukes, which in repeated instances have one after the other hurled entire boats with all
their oars and crews into the air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his balls.*
*Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale and the elephant is
preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the elephant stands in much the same respect to the
whale that a dog does to the elephant; nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious
similitude; among these is the spout. It is well known that the elephant will often draw up water or
dust in his trunk, and then elevating it, jet it forth in a stream.
The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express it. At times
there are gestures in it, which, though they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly
inexplicable. In an extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures, that I
have heard hunters who have declared them akin to Free-Mason signs and symbols; that the
whale, indeed, by these methods intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting other
motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most
experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never
will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how
comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to
say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what
he will about his face, I say again he has no face.
 CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.
The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward from the territories of
Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia. In a continuous line from that peninsula stretch
the long islands of Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, form a vast mole, or
rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia, and dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean
from the thickly studded oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports for
the convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are the straits of Sunda and
Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly, vessels bound to China from the west, emerge into the
China seas.
Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing midway in that vast
rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold green promontory, known to seamen as Java Head;
they not a little correspond to the central gateway opening into some vast walled empire: and
considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels, and gold, and ivory, with
which the thousand islands of that oriental sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision of
nature, that such treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least bear the appearance,
however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping western world. The shores of the
Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to
the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these Orientals do not demand
the obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from the endless procession of ships before the
wind, which for centuries past, by night and by day, have passed between the islands of Sumatra
and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes of the east. But while they freely waive a ceremonial
like this, they do by no means renounce their claim to more solid tribute.
Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among the low shaded coves and
islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the vessels sailing through the straits, fiercely demanding
tribute at the point of their spears. Though by the repeated bloody chastisements they have
received at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these corsairs has of late been
somewhat repressed; yet, even at the present day, we occasionally hear of English and American
vessels, which, in those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.
With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these straits; Ahab purposing to
pass through them into the Javan sea, and thence, cruising northwards, over waters known to be
frequented here and there by the Sperm Whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands, and gain
the far coast of Japan, in time for the great whaling season there. By these means, the
circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the
world, previous to descending upon the Line in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere else
foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby Dick, in the sea he was most known
to frequent; and at a season when he might most reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.
But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew drink air? Surely, he
will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now, the circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring,
and needs no sustenance but what's in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the whaler. While other
hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to foreign wharves; the world-wandering
whale-ship carries no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a whole
lake's contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with utilities; not altogether with unusable
pig-lead and kentledge. She carries years' water in her. Clear old prime Nantucket water; which,
when three years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to drink before the brackish fluid,
but yesterday rafted off in casks, from the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, while other
ships may have gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score of ports, the
whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man
but floating seamen like themselves. So that did you carry them the news that another flood had
come; they would only answer—"Well, boys, here's the ark!"
Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of Java, in the near
vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of the ground, roundabout, was generally
recognised by the fishermen as an excellent spot for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained
more and more upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and admonished to keep
wide awake. But though the green palmy cliffs of the land soon loomed on the starboard bow, and
with delighted nostrils the fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet not a single jet was descried.
Almost renouncing all thought of falling in with any game hereabouts, the ship had well nigh entered
the straits, when the customary cheering cry was heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle of
singular magnificence saluted us.
But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with which of late they have been
hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm Whales, instead of almost invariably sailing in small
detached companies, as in former times, are now frequently met with in extensive herds,
sometimes embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost seem as if numerous nations of
them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection. To this
aggregation of the Sperm Whale into such immense caravans, may be imputed the circumstance
that even in the best cruising grounds, you may now sometimes sail for weeks and months
together, without being greeted by a single spout; and then be suddenly saluted by what
sometimes seems thousands on thousands.
Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and forming a great semicircle,
embracing one half of the level horizon, a continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and
sparkling in the noon-day air. Unlike the straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Right Whale, which,
dividing at top, fall over in two branches, like the cleft drooping boughs of a willow, the single
forward-slanting spout of the Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of white mist, continually
rising and falling away to leeward.
Seen from the Pequod's deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of the sea, this host of
vapoury spouts, individually curling up into the air, and beheld through a blending atmosphere of
bluish haze, showed like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried of a
balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height.
As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains, accelerate their march,
all eagerness to place that perilous passage in their rear, and once more expand in comparative
security upon the plain; even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward through the
straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and swimming on, in one solid, but still
crescentic centre.
Crowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers handling their weapons, and
loudly cheering from the heads of their yet suspended boats. If the wind only held, little doubt had
they, that chased through these Straits of Sunda, the vast host would only deploy into the Oriental
seas to witness the capture of not a few of their number. And who could tell whether, in that
congregated caravan, Moby Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped
white-elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese! So with stun-sail piled on stun-sail,
we sailed along, driving these leviathans before us; when, of a sudden, the voice of Tashtego was
heard, loudly directing attention to something in our wake.
Corresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear. It seemed formed of
detached white vapours, rising and falling something like the spouts of the whales; only they did not
so completely come and go; for they constantly hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling his
glass at this sight, Ahab quickly revolved in his pivot-hole, crying, "Aloft there, and rig whips and
buckets to wet the sails;—Malays, sir, and after us!"
As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should fairly have entered the straits,
these rascally Asiatics were now in hot pursuit, to make up for their over-cautious delay. But when
the swift Pequod, with a fresh leading wind, was herself in hot chase; how very kind of these tawny
philanthropists to assist in speeding her on to her own chosen pursuit,—mere riding-whips and
rowels to her, that they were. As with glass under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in his
forward turn beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after one the bloodthirsty pirates
chasing him; some such fancy as the above seemed his. And when he glanced upon the green
walls of the watery defile in which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him that through that
gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that through that same gate he was now both
chasing and being chased to his deadly end; and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild
pirates and inhuman atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with their curses;—when all
these conceits had passed through his brain, Ahab's brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black
sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being able to drag the firm thing
from its place.
But thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and when, after steadily dropping
and dropping the pirates astern, the Pequod at last shot by the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the
Sumatra side, emerging at last upon the broad waters beyond; then, the harpooneers seemed
more to grieve that the swift whales had been gaining upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship
had so victoriously gained upon the Malays. But still driving on in the wake of the whales, at length
they seemed abating their speed; gradually the ship neared them; and the wind now dying away,
word was passed to spring to the boats. But no sooner did the herd, by some presumed wonderful
instinct of the Sperm Whale, become notified of the three keels that were after them,—though as
yet a mile in their rear,—than they rallied again, and forming in close ranks and battalions, so that
their spouts all looked like flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with redoubled velocity.
Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and after several hours' pulling
were almost disposed to renounce the chase, when a general pausing commotion among the
whales gave animating token that they were now at last under the influence of that strange
perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive it in the whale, they say he is
gallied. The compact martial columns in which they had been hitherto rapidly and steadily
swimming, were now broken up in one measureless rout; and like King Porus' elephants in the
Indian battle with Alexander, they seemed going mad with consternation. In all directions expanding
in vast irregular circles, and aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their short thick spoutings,
they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic. This was still more strangely evinced by those of
their number, who, completely paralysed as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled
ships on the sea. Had these Leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep, pursued over the
pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not possibly have evinced such excessive dismay. But
this occasional timidity is characteristic of almost all herding creatures. Though banding together
in tens of thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled before a solitary horseman.
Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded together in the sheepfold of a theatre's pit, they
will, at the slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming,
and remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at the
strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not
infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion, yet it is to be observed
that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As
is customary in those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one lone whale
on the outskirts of the shoal. In about three minutes' time, Queequeg's harpoon was flung; the
stricken fish darted blinding spray in our faces, and then running away with us like light, steered
straight for the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the part of the whale struck under
such circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented; and indeed is almost always more or less
anticipated; yet does it present one of the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. For as the swift
monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and
only exist in a delirious throb.
As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of speed to rid himself of
the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides
menaced as we flew, by the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was like a
ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer through their complicated channels
and straits, knowing not at what moment it may be locked in and crushed.
But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off from this monster directly
across our route in advance; now edging away from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended
overhead, while all the time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our way
whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time to make long ones. Nor were
the oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly
attended to the shouting part of the business. "Out of the way, Commodore!" cried one, to a great
dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an instant threatened to swamp us.
"Hard down with your tail, there!" cried a second to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed
calmly cooling himself with his own fan-like extremity.
All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented by the Nantucket Indians,
called druggs. Two thick squares of wood of equal size are stoutly clenched together, so that they
cross each other's grain at right angles; a line of considerable length is then attached to the middle
of this block, and the other end of the line being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a
harpoon. It is chiefly among gallied whales that this drugg is used. For then, more whales are close
round you than you can possibly chase at one time. But sperm whales are not every day
encountered; while you may, then, you must kill all you can. And if you cannot kill them all at once,
you must wing them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it is, that at times
like these the drugg, comes into requisition. Our boat was furnished with three of them. The first
and second were successfully darted, and we saw the whales staggeringly running off, fettered by
the enormous sidelong resistance of the towing drugg. They were cramped like malefactors with
the chain and ball. But upon flinging the third, in the act of tossing overboard the clumsy wooden
block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat, and in an instant tore it out and carried it away,
dropping the oarsman in the boat's bottom as the seat slid from under him. On both sides the sea
came in at the wounded planks, but we stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so stopped
the leaks for the time.
It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were it not that as we advanced
into the herd, our whale's way greatly diminished; moreover, that as we went still further and further
from the circumference of commotion, the direful disorders seemed waning. So that when at last
the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways vanished; then, with the tapering
force of his parting momentum, we glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the
shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here the storms in
the roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In this central expanse the
sea presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture
thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods. Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which
they say lurks at the heart of every commotion. And still in the distracted distance we beheld the
tumults of the outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales, eight or ten in each,
swiftly going round and round, like multiplied spans of horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to
shoulder, that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have over-arched the middle ones, and so have
gone round on their backs. Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales, more
immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no possible chance of escape was at
present afforded us. We must watch for a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that
had only admitted us in order to shut us up. Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally
visited by small tame cows and calves; the women and children of this routed host.
Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving outer circles, and inclusive
of the spaces between the various pods in any one of those circles, the entire area at this juncture,
embraced by the whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three square miles. At any
rate—though indeed such a test at such a time might be deceptive—spoutings might be
discovered from our low boat that seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention
this circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely locked up in this
innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of the herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the
precise cause of its stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way
innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller whales—now and then
visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake—evinced a wondrous fearlessness and
confidence, or else a still becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like
household dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it
almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg patted their
foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the
time refrained from darting it.
But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our
eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the
nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become
mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as
human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two
different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon
some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards
us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their sides,
the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little infants, that from certain queer
tokens seemed hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six
feet in girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that
irksome position it had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready
for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar's bow. The delicate side-fins, and the
palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby's ears newly
arrived from foreign parts.
"Line! line!" cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; "him fast! him fast!—Who line him! Who
struck?—Two whale; one big, one little!"
"What ails ye, man?" cried Starbuck.
"Look-e here," said Queequeg, pointing down.
As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of fathoms of rope; as,
after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and
spiralling towards the air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame
Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not seldom in the rapid
vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line, with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with
the hempen one, so that the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas
seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep.*
*The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike most other fish, breeds
indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation which may probably be set down at nine months,
producing but one at a time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and
Jacob:—a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one on each side
of the anus; but the breasts themselves extend upwards from that. When by chance these precious
parts in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter's lance, the mother's pouring milk and blood rivallingly
discolour the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do
well with strawberries. When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute MORE HOMINUM.
And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these
inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea,
serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do
I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe
revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.
Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic spectacles in the distance
evinced the activity of the other boats, still engaged in drugging the whales on the frontier of the
host; or possibly carrying on the war within the first circle, where abundance of room and some
convenient retreats were afforded them. But the sight of the enraged drugged whales now and then
blindly darting to and fro across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our eyes. It is
sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly powerful and alert, to seek to
hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or maiming his gigantic tail-tendon. It is done by darting a
short-handled cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it back again. A whale
wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this part, but not effectually, as it seemed, had broken away
from the boat, carrying along with him half of the harpoon line; and in the extraordinary agony of the
wound, he was now dashing among the revolving circles like the lone mounted desperado Arnold,
at the battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay wherever he went.
But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle enough, any way; yet
the peculiar horror with which he seemed to inspire the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause
which at first the intervening distance obscured from us. But at length we perceived that by one of
the unimaginable accidents of the fishery, this whale had become entangled in the harpoon-line
that he towed; he had also run away with the cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the
rope attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the harpoon-line round his
tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose from his flesh. So that tormented to madness, he
was now churning through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and tossing the keen
spade about him, wounding and murdering his own comrades.
This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their stationary fright. First, the whales
forming the margin of our lake began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by
half spent billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to heave and swell; the submarine
bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the
more central circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was departing. A low
advancing hum was soon heard; and then like to the tumultuous masses of block-ice when the
great river Hudson breaks up in Spring, the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner
centre, as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain. Instantly Starbuck and Queequeg
changed places; Starbuck taking the stern.
"Oars! Oars!" he intensely whispered, seizing the helm—"gripe your oars, and clutch your souls,
now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him off, you Queequeg—the whale there!—prick him!—hit
him! Stand up—stand up, and stay so! Spring, men—pull, men; never mind their backs—scrape
them!—scrape away!"
The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, leaving a narrow Dardanelles
between their long lengths. But by desperate endeavor we at last shot into a temporary opening;
then giving way rapidly, and at the same time earnestly watching for another outlet. After many
similar hair-breadth escapes, we at last swiftly glided into what had just been one of the outer
circles, but now crossed by random whales, all violently making for one centre. This lucky salvation
was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg's hat, who, while standing in the bows to prick the
fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his head by the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing
of a pair of broad flukes close by.
Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon resolved itself into what
seemed a systematic movement; for having clumped together at last in one dense body, they then
renewed their onward flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but the boats
still lingered in their wake to pick up what drugged whales might be dropped astern, and likewise
to secure one which Flask had killed and waifed. The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of
which are carried by every boat; and which, when additional game is at hand, are inserted upright
into the floating body of a dead whale, both to mark its place on the sea, and also as token of prior
possession, should the boats of any other ship draw near.
The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious saying in the Fishery,
—the more whales the less fish. Of all the drugged whales only one was captured. The rest
contrived to escape for the time, but only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other craft
than the Pequod.
 CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm Whales, and there
was also then given the probable cause inducing those vast aggregations.
Now, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must have been seen, even at
the present day, small detached bands are occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty
individuals each. Such bands are known as schools. They generally are of two sorts; those
composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but young vigorous males, or
bulls, as they are familiarly designated.
In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a male of full grown
magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces his gallantry by falling in the rear and
covering the flight of his ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about
over the watery world, surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces and endearments of the
harem. The contrast between this Ottoman and his concubines is striking; because, while he is
always of the largest leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not more than one-
third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They are comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not
to exceed half a dozen yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the
whole they are hereditarily entitled to EMBONPOINT.
It is very curious to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent ramblings. Like fashionables,
they are for ever on the move in leisurely search of variety. You meet them on the Line in time for
the full flower of the Equatorial feeding season, having just returned, perhaps, from spending the
summer in the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all unpleasant weariness and warmth.
By the time they have lounged up and down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for the
Oriental waters in anticipation of the cool season there, and so evade the other excessive
temperature of the year.
When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange suspicious sights are seen,
my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his interesting family. Should any unwarrantably pert young
Leviathan coming that way, presume to draw confidentially close to one of the ladies, with what
prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases him away! High times, indeed, if unprincipled
young rakes like him are to be permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though do what
the Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out of his bed; for, alas! all fish bed in
common. As ashore, the ladies often cause the most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just
so with the whales, who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. They fence with their
long lower jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving for the supremacy like elks that
warringly interweave their antlers. Not a few are captured having the deep scars of these
encounters,—furrowed heads, broken teeth, scolloped fins; and in some instances, wrenched and
dislocated mouths.
But supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at the first rush of the
harem's lord, then is it very diverting to watch that lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among
them again and revels there awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario, like pious Solomon
devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines. Granting other whales to be in sight, the
fishermen will seldom give chase to one of these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too lavish
of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small. As for the sons and the daughters they
beget, why, those sons and daughters must take care of themselves; at least, with only the
maternal help. For like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my Lord Whale
has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower; and so, being a great traveller, he leaves
his anonymous babies all over the world; every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as the
ardour of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends her solemn pauses; in
short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated Turk; then a love of ease and virtue supplants the
love for maidens; our Ottoman enters upon the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of life,
forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to an exemplary, sulky old soul, goes about all alone
among the meridians and parallels saying his prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from his
amorous errors.
Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so is the lord and master of
that school technically known as the schoolmaster. It is therefore not in strict character, however
admirably satirical, that after going to school himself, he should then go abroad inculcating not
what he learned there, but the folly of it. His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived
from the name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man who first thus
entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself
what sort of a country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what
was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils.
The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale betakes himself in his
advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm Whales. Almost universally, a lone whale—as a solitary
Leviathan is called—proves an ancient one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will
have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and
the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets.
The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously mentioned, offer a
strong contrast to the harem schools. For while those female whales are characteristically timid,
the young males, or forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious of all
Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter; excepting those wondrous grey-
headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met, and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a
penal gout.
The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like a mob of young collegians,
they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking
rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or
Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence though, and when about three-fourths grown, break
up, and separately go about in quest of settlements, that is, harems.
Another point of difference between the male and female schools is still more characteristic of
the sexes. Say you strike a Forty-barrel-bull—poor devil! all his comrades quit him. But strike a
member of the harem school, and her companions swim around her with every token of concern,
sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey.
 CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
The allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the last chapter but one, necessitates some account of
the laws and regulations of the whale fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol
and badge.
It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company, a whale may be struck by
one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed and captured by another vessel; and herein are
indirectly comprised many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature. For
example,—after a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale, the body may get loose from
the ship by reason of a violent storm; and drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second
whaler, who, in a calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line. Thus the most vexatious
and violent disputes would often arise between the fishermen, were there not some written or
unwritten, universal, undisputed law applicable to all cases.
Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment, was that of Holland. It
was decreed by the States-General in A.D. 1695. But though no other nation has ever had any
written whaling law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and lawyers in this
matter. They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's
Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other
People's Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen Anne's forthing, or the barb of
a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they.
I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.
II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.
But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which
necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.
First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an
occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast,
an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same. Likewise a fish
is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other recognised symbol of possession; so long as
the party waifing it plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their
intention so to do.
These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen themselves
sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks—the Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True,
among the more upright and honourable whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar
cases, where it would be an outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim possession of a
whale previously chased or killed by another party. But others are by no means so scrupulous.
Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated in England, wherein the
plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of a whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed they
(the plaintiffs) had succeeded in harpooning the fish; they were at last, through peril of their lives,
obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat itself. Ultimately the defendants (the crew of
another ship) came up with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it before the
very eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those defendants were remonstrated with, their captain
snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs' teeth, and assured them that by way of doxology to the deed
he had done, he would now retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had remained attached to
the whale at the time of the seizure. Wherefore the plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value
of their whale, line, harpoons, and boat.
Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was the judge. In the course of
the defence, the witty Erskine went on to illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent crim. con.
case, wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his wife's viciousness, had at last
abandoned her upon the seas of life; but in the course of years, repenting of that step, he instituted
an action to recover possession of her. Erskine was on the other side; and he then supported it by
saying, that though the gentleman had originally harpooned the lady, and had once had her fast,
and only by reason of the great stress of her plunging viciousness, had at last abandoned her; yet
abandon her he did, so that she became a loose-fish; and therefore when a subsequent gentleman
re-harpooned her, the lady then became that subsequent gentleman's property, along with
whatever harpoon might have been found sticking in her.
Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the whale and the lady were
reciprocally illustrative of each other.
These pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very learned Judge in set
terms decided, to wit,—That as for the boat, he awarded it to the plaintiffs, because they had
merely abandoned it to save their lives; but that with regard to the controverted whale, harpoons,
and line, they belonged to the defendants; the whale, because it was a Loose-Fish at the time of
the final capture; and the harpoons and line because when the fish made off with them, it (the fish)
acquired a property in those articles; and hence anybody who afterwards took the fish had a right
to them. Now the defendants afterwards took the fish; ergo, the aforesaid articles were theirs.
A common man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might possibly object to it.
But ploughed up to the primary rock of the matter, the two great principles laid down in the twin
whaling laws previously quoted, and applied and elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in the above
cited case; these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say, will, on reflection, be found
the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence; for notwithstanding its complicated tracery of
sculpture, the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but two props to stand on.
Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how
the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews
and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole
of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow's last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder
undetected villain's marble mansion with a door-plate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What
is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a
loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish?
What is the Archbishop of Savesoul's income of L100,000 seized from the scant bread and
cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven without any of
Savesoul's help) what is that globular L100,000 but a Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder's
hereditary towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor
Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish?
And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law?
But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-
Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable.
What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard
by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece
to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-
Fish.
What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's
minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-
Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish?
What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a
Fast-Fish, too?
 CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.
"De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam." BRACTON, L. 3, C. 3.
Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the context, means, that of
all whales captured by anybody on the coast of that land, the King, as Honourary Grand
Harpooneer, must have the head, and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail. A division
which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no intermediate remainder. Now as this
law, under a modified form, is to this day in force in England; and as it offers in various respects a
strange anomaly touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of in a
separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that prompts the English railways to be at the
expense of a separate car, specially reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first place,
in curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in force, I proceed to lay before you
a circumstance that happened within the last two years.
It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of the Cinque Ports,
had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and beaching a fine whale which they had originally
descried afar off from the shore. Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the
jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden. Holding the office directly from
the crown, I believe, all the royal emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by
assignment his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so. Because the Lord
Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that
same fobbing of them.
Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their trowsers rolled high up on
their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat fish high and dry, promising themselves a good L150
from the precious oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good ale with
their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares; up steps a very learned and most
Christian and charitable gentleman, with a copy of Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon the
whale's head, he says—"Hands off! this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it as the Lord
Warden's." Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful consternation—so truly English
—knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully
glancing from the whale to the stranger. But that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the
hard heart of the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone. At length one of them, after long
scratching about for his ideas, made bold to speak,
"Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?"
"The Duke."
"But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?"
"It is his."
"We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is all that to go to the Duke's
benefit; we getting nothing at all for our pains but our blisters?"
"It is his."
"Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of getting a livelihood?"
"It is his."
"I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of this whale."
"It is his."
"Won't the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?"
 "It is his."
In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of Wellington received the
money. Thinking that viewed in some particular lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some
small degree be deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman of the
town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to take the case of those unfortunate
mariners into full consideration. To which my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were
published) that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be obliged to the
reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend gentleman) would decline meddling with other
people's business. Is this the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the three kingdoms,
on all hands coercing alms of beggars?
It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the Duke to the whale was a delegated
one from the Sovereign. We must needs inquire then on what principle the Sovereign is originally
invested with that right. The law itself has already been set forth. But Plowdon gives us the reason
for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs to the King and Queen, "because of its superior
excellence." And by the soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in
such matters.
But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason for that, ye lawyers!
In his treatise on "Queen-Gold," or Queen-pinmoney, an old King's Bench author, one William
Prynne, thus discourseth: "Ye tail is ye Queen's, that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied with ye
whalebone." Now this was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or Right
whale was largely used in ladies' bodices. But this same bone is not in the tail; it is in the head,
which is a sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be
presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.
There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers—the whale and the sturgeon; both
royal property under certain limitations, and nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown's
ordinary revenue. I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by inference it
seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same way as the whale, the King receiving
the highly dense and elastic head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly
be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there seems a reason in all
things, even in law.
 CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
"In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan, insufferable fetor denying
not inquiry." SIR T. BROWNE, V.E.
It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we were slowly sailing
over a sleepy, vapoury, mid-day sea, that the many noses on the Pequod's deck proved more
vigilant discoverers than the three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was
smelt in the sea.
"I will bet something now," said Stubb, "that somewhere hereabouts are some of those drugged
whales we tickled the other day. I thought they would keel up before long."
Presently, the vapours in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay a ship, whose furled
sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger
showed French colours from his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled,
and hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside must be what the
fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated
an unappropriated corpse. It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must
exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the
departed. So intolerable indeed is it regarded by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to
moor alongside of it. Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact that the oil
obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and by no means of the nature of attar-of-
rose.
Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman had a second whale
alongside; and this second whale seemed even more of a nosegay than the first. In truth, it turned
out to be one of those problematical whales that seem to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious
dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil.
Nevertheless, in the proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn up his nose
at such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted whales in general.
The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed he recognised his cutting
spade-pole entangled in the lines that were knotted round the tail of one of these whales.
"There's a pretty fellow, now," he banteringly laughed, standing in the ship's bows, "there's a
jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes of Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery;
sometimes lowering their boats for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes, and
sometimes sailing from their port with their hold full of boxes of tallow candles, and cases of
snuffers, foreseeing that all the oil they will get won't be enough to dip the Captain's wick into; aye,
we all know these things; but look ye, here's a Crappo that is content with our leavings, the
drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and is content too with scraping the dry bones of that other
precious fish he has there. Poor devil! I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let's make him a
present of a little oil for dear charity's sake. For what oil he'll get from that drugged whale there,
wouldn't be fit to burn in a jail; no, not in a condemned cell. And as for the other whale, why, I'll agree
to get more oil by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours, than he'll get from that
bundle of bones; though, now that I think of it, it may contain something worth a good deal more
than oil; yes, ambergris. I wonder now if our old man has thought of that. It's worth trying. Yes, I'm for
it;" and so saying he started for the quarter-deck.
By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether or no, the Pequod was
now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing
from the cabin, Stubb now called his boat's crew, and pulled off for the stranger. Drawing across
her bow, he perceived that in accordance with the fanciful French taste, the upper part of her stem-
piece was carved in the likeness of a huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had
copper spikes projecting from it here and there; the whole terminating in a symmetrical folded bulb
of a bright red colour. Upon her head boards, in large gilt letters, he read "Bouton de Rose,"
—Rose-button, or Rose-bud; and this was the romantic name of this aromatic ship.
Though Stubb did not understand the BOUTON part of the inscription, yet the word ROSE, and
the bulbous figure-head put together, sufficiently explained the whole to him.
"A wooden rose-bud, eh?" he cried with his hand to his nose, "that will do very well; but how like
all creation it smells!"
Now in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he had to pull round the
bows to the starboard side, and thus come close to the blasted whale; and so talk over it.
Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he bawled—"Bouton-de-Rose, ahoy! are
there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that speak English?"
"Yes," rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out to be the chief-mate.
"Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?"
"WHAT whale?"
"The WHITE Whale—a Sperm Whale—Moby Dick, have ye seen him?
"Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White Whale—no."
"Very good, then; good bye now, and I'll call again in a minute."
Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning over the quarter-deck
rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two hands into a trumpet and shouted—"No, Sir! No!"
Upon which Ahab retired, and Stubb returned to the Frenchman.
He now perceived that the Guernsey-man, who had just got into the chains, and was using a
cutting-spade, had slung his nose in a sort of bag.
"What's the matter with your nose, there?" said Stubb. "Broke it?"
"I wish it was broken, or that I didn't have any nose at all!" answered the Guernsey-man, who did
not seem to relish the job he was at very much. "But what are you holding YOURS for?"
"Oh, nothing! It's a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, ain't it? Air rather gardenny, I should
say; throw us a bunch of posies, will ye, Bouton-de-Rose?"
"What in the devil's name do you want here?" roared the Guernseyman, flying into a sudden
passion.
"Oh! keep cool—cool? yes, that's the word! why don't you pack those whales in ice while you're
working at 'em? But joking aside, though; do you know, Rose-bud, that it's all nonsense trying to
get any oil out of such whales? As for that dried up one, there, he hasn't a gill in his whole carcase."
"I know that well enough; but, d'ye see, the Captain here won't believe it; this is his first voyage;
he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But come aboard, and mayhap he'll believe you, if he
won't me; and so I'll get out of this dirty scrape."
"Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow," rejoined Stubb, and with that he soon
mounted to the deck. There a queer scene presented itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of red
worsted, were getting the heavy tackles in readiness for the whales. But they worked rather slow
and talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a good humor. All their noses upwardly projected
from their faces like so many jib-booms. Now and then pairs of them would drop their work, and
run up to the mast-head to get some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch the plague, dipped
oakum in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their nostrils. Others having broken the stems of their
pipes almost short off at the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it constantly
filled their olfactories.
Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from the Captain's round-
house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a fiery face thrust from behind the door, which was
held ajar from within. This was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating against the
proceedings of the day, had betaken himself to the Captain's round-house (CABINET he called it)
to avoid the pest; but still, could not help yelling out his entreaties and indignations at times.
Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the Guernsey-man had a little
chat with him, during which the stranger mate expressed his detestation of his Captain as a
conceited ignoramus, who had brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle.
Sounding him carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man had not the slightest
suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore held his peace on that head, but otherwise was
quite frank and confidential with him, so that the two quickly concocted a little plan for both
circumventing and satirizing the Captain, without his at all dreaming of distrusting their sincerity.
According to this little plan of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover of an interpreter's office, was
to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and as for Stubb, he was to utter
any nonsense that should come uppermost in him during the interview.
By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a small and dark, but rather
delicate looking man for a sea-captain, with large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a
red cotton velvet vest with watch-seals at his side. To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely
introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at once ostentatiously put on the aspect of interpreting
between them.
"What shall I say to him first?" said he.
"Why," said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, "you may as well begin by
telling him that he looks a sort of babyish to me, though I don't pretend to be a judge."
"He says, Monsieur," said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his captain, "that only
yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain and chief-mate, with six sailors, had all died of a
fever caught from a blasted whale they had brought alongside."
Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.
"What now?" said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.
"Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him carefully, I'm quite certain that
he's no more fit to command a whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him from me he's a
baboon."
"He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one, is far more deadly than the
blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures us, as we value our lives, to cut loose from these fish."
Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his crew to desist from
hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose the cables and chains confining the whales to
the ship.
"What now?" said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to them.
"Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that—that—in fact, tell him I've diddled him,
and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody else."
"He says, Monsieur, that he's very happy to have been of any service to us."
Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties (meaning himself and mate)
and concluded by inviting Stubb down into his cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.
"He wants you to take a glass of wine with him," said the interpreter.
"Thank him heartily; but tell him it's against my principles to drink with the man I've diddled. In
fact, tell him I must go."
"He says, Monsieur, that his principles won't admit of his drinking; but that if Monsieur wants to
live another day to drink, then Monsieur had best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from
these whales, for it's so calm they won't drift."
By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed the Guernsey-man to this
effect,—that having a long tow-line in his boat, he would do what he could to help them, by pulling
out the lighter whale of the two from the ship's side. While the Frenchman's boats, then, were
engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb benevolently towed away at his whale the other way,
ostentatiously slacking out a most unusually long tow-line.
Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale; hoisting his boats, the
Frenchman soon increased his distance, while the Pequod slid in between him and Stubb's whale.
Whereupon Stubb quickly pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to give notice of his
intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of his unrighteous cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-
spade, he commenced an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost
have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at length his spade struck against
the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old Roman tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam. His
boat's crew were all in high excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as gold-
hunters.
And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and screaming, and yelling, and
fighting around them. Stubb was beginning to look disappointed, especially as the horrible
nosegay increased, when suddenly from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint stream
of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without being absorbed by it, as one river
will flow into and then along with another, without at all blending with it for a time.
"I have it, I have it," cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in the subterranean regions, "a
purse! a purse!"
Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of something that looked like
ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily
dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. And this, good friends, is
ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six handfuls were obtained; but
more was unavoidably lost in the sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been secured were it not
for impatient Ahab's loud command to Stubb to desist, and come on board, else the ship would bid
them good bye.
 CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.
Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article of commerce,
that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin was examined at the bar of the English
House of Commons on that subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the
precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the learned. Though the word
ambergris is but the French compound for grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct.
For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils,
whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent,
brittle, odorless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but
ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in
pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also
carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter's in Rome. Some
wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.
Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an
essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is
supposed to be the cause, and by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure
such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of
Brandreth's pills, and then running out of harm's way, as laborers do in blasting rocks.
I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris, certain hard, round, bony plates,
which at first Stubb thought might be sailors' trowsers buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they
were nothing more than pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that manner.
Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found in the heart of such
decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and
incorruption; how that we are sown in dishonour, but raised in glory. And likewise call to mind that
saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk. Also forget not the strange fact
that of all things of ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the worst.
I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but cannot, owing to my anxiety to
repel a charge often made against whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already
biased minds, might be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the
Frenchman's two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has been disproved,
that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to
rebut. They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma originate?
I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the Greenland whaling ships in London,
more than two centuries ago. Because those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their
oil at sea as the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits,
thrust it through the bung holes of large casks, and carry it home in that manner; the shortness of
the season in those Icy Seas, and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed,
forbidding any other course. The consequence is, that upon breaking into the hold, and unloading
one of these whale cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a savor is given forth somewhat similar to
that arising from excavating an old city grave-yard, for the foundations of a Lying-in-Hospital.
I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be likewise imputed to the
existence on the coast of Greenland, in former times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or
Smeerenberg, which latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great work
on Smells, a text-book on that subject. As its name imports (smeer, fat; berg, to put up), this village
was founded in order to afford a place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried out,
without being taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of furnaces, fat-kettles,
and oil sheds; and when the works were in full operation certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor.
But all this is quite different with a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four years
perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil, does not, perhaps, consume fifty days in the
business of boiling out; and in the state that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that
living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor;
nor can whalemen be recognised, as the people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the
company, by the nose. Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant, when, as a
general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance of exercise; always out of doors;
though, it is true, seldom in the open air. I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale's flukes above
water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor. What
then shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude? Must it not be to
that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian
town to do honour to Alexander the Great?
 CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.
It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most significant event befell
the most insignificant of the Pequod's crew; an event most lamentable; and which ended in
providing the sometimes madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying
prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.
Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some few hands are reserved
called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the
whale. As a general thing, these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the
boats' crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous wight in the ship, that
wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by
nick-name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his
tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly.
In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a white one, of equal
developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-
Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom
very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy
all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year's calendar
should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year's Days. Nor
smile so, while I write that this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold
yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king's cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all life's peaceable
securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably become
entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus
temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by strange wild fires,
that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County
in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the green; and at melodious even-
tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though
in the clear air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will
healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its most impressive
lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some
unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing
diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the
King of Hell. But let us to the story.
It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb's after-oarsman chanced so to sprain his
hand, as for a time to become quite maimed; and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place.
The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness; but happily, for that time,
escaped close contact with the whale; and therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though
Stubb observing him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his courageousness to the
utmost, for he might often find it needful.
Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as the fish received the
darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which happened, in this instance, to be right under poor
Pip's seat. The involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in hand, out of
the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale line coming against his chest, he breasted
it overboard with him, so as to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water. That
instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line swiftly straightened; and presto! poor Pip
came all foaming up to the chocks of the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had
taken several turns around his chest and neck.
Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He hated Pip for a poltroon.
Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath, he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning
towards Stubb, exclaimed interrogatively, "Cut?" Meantime Pip's blue, choked face plainly looked,
Do, for God's sake! All passed in a flash. In less than half a minute, this entire thing happened.
"Damn him, cut!" roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was saved.
So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed by yells and execrations
from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain,
business-like, but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done, unofficially gave
him much wholesome advice. The substance was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except—but all the
rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, STICK TO THE BOAT, is your
true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when LEAP FROM THE BOAT, is still
better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he should give undiluted conscientious advice to
Pip, he would be leaving him too wide a margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped
all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command, "Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I
won't pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale
would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don't jump any
more." Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a
money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was under very similar
circumstances to the first performance; but this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when
the whale started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller's trunk. Alas! Stubb
was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day; the spangled sea calm and
cool, and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater's skin hammered out to
the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip's ebon head showed like a head of cloves.
No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb's inexorable back was turned upon
him; and the whale was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between
Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the
sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.
Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride
in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration
of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when
sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast
along her sides.
But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he did not mean to, at least.
Because there were two boats in his wake, and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course
come up to Pip very quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards
oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested by the hunters in all
similar instances; and such instances not unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a
coward, so called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies and
armies.
But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them
on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his
crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By
the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about
the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but
drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to
wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his
passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the
joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral
insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the
treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is
heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought,
which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as
his God.
For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that fishery; and in the sequel of
the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment befell myself.
 CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.
That whale of Stubb's, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod's side, where all
those cutting and hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the
baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.
While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the
larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm
was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.
It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before
a large Constantine's bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling
about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and
unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favourite cosmetic. Such a
clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it
for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralise.
As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass;
under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my
hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they
richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I
snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare
to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that
inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old
Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in
that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost
melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself
unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.
Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was
continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,
—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the
slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves
into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged,
repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least
shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the
wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all
this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of
angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things akin to it, in the business
of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works.
First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering part of the fish, and also
from the thicker portions of his flukes. It is tough with congealed tendons—a wad of muscle—but
still contains some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first cut into portable
oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble.
Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale's flesh, here
and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often participating to a considerable degree in its
unctuousness. It is a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is
of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots
of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it is
hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it. It tasted
something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted,
supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, and that particular
venison season contemporary with an unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.
There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the course of this
business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion; an
appellation original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an ineffably
oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and
subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case,
coalescing.
Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but sometimes incidentally used
by the sperm fishermen. It designates the dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the back
of the Greenland or right whale, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior souls who
hunt that ignoble Leviathan.
Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's vocabulary. But as applied by
whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman's nipper is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the
tapering part of Leviathan's tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is about the size
of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee;
and by nameless blandishments, as of magic, allures along with it all impurities.
But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once to descend into the
blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates. This place has previously been mentioned as
the receptacle for the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When the proper
time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by
night. On one side, lit by a dull lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. They generally
go in pairs,—a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The whaling-pike is similar to a frigate's
boarding-weapon of the same name. The gaff is something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the
gaffman hooks on to a sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches and
lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it
into the portable horse-pieces. This spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan's feet are
shoeless; the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. If he
cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants', would you be very much astonished? Toes
are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.
 CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.
Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the
whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have
scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen
there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale's huge
head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of
these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,—longer than a
Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of
Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or, rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that
found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which, King Asa, her
son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron,
as darkly set forth in the 15th chapter of the First Book of Kings.
Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by two allies, heavily
backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if
he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle deck,
he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This
done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to
double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken
down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits
for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer now stands
before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture
alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.
That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the pots; an operation which is
conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted endwise against the bulwarks, and with a
capacious tub beneath it, into which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator's
desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves; what a
candidate for an archbishopric, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!*
*Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the mates to the mincer. It enjoins him
to be careful, and cut his work into as thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the
business of boiling out the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased,
besides perhaps improving it in quality.
 CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.
Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished by her try-works. She
presents the curious anomaly of the most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting
the completed ship. It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her planks.
The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most roomy part of the deck.
The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass
of brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The foundation does not
penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron
bracing it on all sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased with wood, and
at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose
the great try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels' capacity. When not in use, they are
kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone and sand, till they shine within
like silver punch-bowls. During the night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and
coil themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them—one man in each pot,
side by side—many confidential communications are carried on, over the iron lips. It is a place
also for profound mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the
soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that
in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from any
point in precisely the same time.
Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare masonry of that side is
exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These
mouths are fitted with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented from
communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir extending under the entire
inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished
with water as fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open direct from the rear
wall. And here let us go back for a moment.
It was about nine o'clock at night that the Pequod's try-works were first started on this present
voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee the business.
"All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the works." This was an easy thing,
for the carpenter had been thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be
it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood. After
that no wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being
tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its
unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-
consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.
Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must,
and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about
it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of
judgment; it is an argument for the pit.
By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the carcase; sail had been
made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was
licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated
every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if
remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of
the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for
sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.
The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them.
Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship's
stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots,
or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them
by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of
the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the
works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa.
Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their
eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat,
their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely
revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy
adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards
out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly
gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea
leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into
the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and
viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden
with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material
counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.
So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-
ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the
madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering
half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to
yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.
But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) thing occurred to me. Starting
from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller
smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning to
shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the
lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no
compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card,
by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and
then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift,
rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens
astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped
the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted.
My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and
was fronting the ship's stern, with my back to her prow and the compass. In an instant I faced back,
just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How
glad and how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal
contingency of being brought by the lee!
Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not
thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when
its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright;
those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler,
relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!
Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor
wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides
not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So,
therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true
—not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows,
and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. "All
is vanity." ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who
dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas
than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a
care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man is fitted
to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous
Solomon.
 But even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall
remain" (I.E., even while living) "in the congregation of the dead." Give not thyself up, then, to fire,
lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is
a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into
the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And
even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest
swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
 CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.
Had you descended from the Pequod's try-works to the Pequod's forecastle, where the off duty
watch were sleeping, for one single moment you would have almost thought you were standing in
some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay in their triangular
oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.
In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of queens. To dress in the dark,
and eat in the dark, and stumble in darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as
he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an Aladdin's lamp, and lays him
down in it; so that in the pitchiest night the ship's black hull still houses an illumination.
See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps—often but old bottles
and vials, though—to the copper cooler at the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of
ale at a vat. He burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore, unvitiated state; a
fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass butter in April.
He goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and genuineness, even as the
traveller on the prairie hunts up his own supper of game.
 CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off descried from the mast-head; how
he is chased over the watery moors, and slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then
towed alongside and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman of old to
the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great padded surtout becomes the property of
his executioner; how, in due time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and
Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;—but now it remains to
conclude the last chapter of this part of the description by rehearsing—singing, if I may—the
romantic proceeding of decanting off his oil into the casks and striking them down into the hold,
where once again leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding along beneath the surface as
before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow.
While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps,
the ship is pitching and rolling this way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are
slewed round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot across the slippery
deck, like so many land slides, till at last man-handled and stayed in their course; and all round the
hoops, rap, rap, go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now, EX OFFICIO, every sailor is
a cooper.
At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great hatchways are unsealed, the
bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This done,
the hatches are replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.
In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable incidents in all the business of
whaling. One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck
enormous masses of the whale's head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a
brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about
suffused with unctuousness; the entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the
din is deafening.
But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this self-same ship; and were it
not for the tell-tale boats and try-works, you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant
vessel, with a most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses a
singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never look so white as just after what
they call an affair of oil. Besides, from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent lye is
readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale remains clinging to the
side, that lye quickly exterminates it. Hands go diligently along the bulwarks, and with buckets of
water and rags restore them to their full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the lower rigging. All the
numerous implements which have been in use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put away. The
great hatch is scrubbed and placed upon the try-works, completely hiding the pots; every cask is
out of sight; all tackles are coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined and simultaneous
industry of almost the entire ship's company, the whole of this conscientious duty is at last
concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own ablutions; shift themselves from top to
toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow, as bridegrooms new-leaped from
out the daintiest Holland.
Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and humorously discourse of
parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics; propose to mat the deck; think of having hanging to the
top; object not to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to such musked
mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short of audacity. They know not the thing you
distantly allude to. Away, and bring us napkins!
But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent on spying out more whales,
which, if caught, infallibly will again soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-
spot somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted labors, which
know no night; continuing straight through for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have
swelled their wrists with all day rowing on the Line,—they only step to the deck to carry vast chains,
and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very sweatings to be smoked
and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when,
on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a
spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean
frocks, are startled by the cry of "There she blows!" and away they fly to fight another whale, and go
through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For
hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable
sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live
here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when—THERE SHE BLOWS!—the ghost
is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine
again.
Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did
die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and,
foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!
 CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.
Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck, taking regular turns at
either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it
has not been added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood, he was
wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely eyeing the particular object before
him. When he halted before the binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the
compass, that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his purpose; and when
resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast, then, as the same riveted glance
fastened upon the riveted gold coin there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only
dashed with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness.
But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly attracted by the strange
figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for
himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain
significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty
cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the
Milky Way.
Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the heart of gorgeous
hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And
though now nailed amidst all the rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet,
untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its Quito glow. Nor, though placed
amongst a ruthless crew and every hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights
shrouded with thick darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless every sunrise
found the doubloon where the sunset left it last. For it was set apart and sanctified to one awe-
striking end; and however wanton in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as the
white whale's talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch by night, wondering
whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever live to spend it.
Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun and tropic token-
pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun's disks and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and
rich banners waving, are in luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to
derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing through those fancy mints, so
Spanishly poetic.
It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example of these things. On
its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came
from a country planted in the middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after
it; and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned
by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes' summits; from one a flame; a tower on
another; on the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned
zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the
equinoctial point at Libra.
Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now pausing.
"There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty
things; look here,—three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that
is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and
this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's glass, to each and
every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those who
ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy
face; but see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he
wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in throes, 't is
fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then! Here's stout stuff for woe to work
on. So be it, then."
"No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil's claws must have left their mouldings
there since yesterday," murmured Starbuck to himself, leaning against the bulwarks. "The old man
seems to read Belshazzar's awful writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly. He goes
below; let me read. A dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem
the Trinity, in some faint earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all
our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope. If we bend down our eyes,
the dark vale shows her mouldy soil; but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance half way, to
cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet
solace from him, we gaze for him in vain! This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I
will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely."
"There now's the old Mogul," soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, "he's been twigging it; and
there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with faces which I should say might be somewhere
within nine fathoms long. And all from looking at a piece of gold, which did I have it now on Negro
Hill or in Corlaer's Hook, I'd not look at it very long ere spending it. Humph! in my poor, insignificant
opinion, I regard this as queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons
of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili, your doubloons of Bolivia, your
doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, and
quarter joes. What then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator that is so killing wonderful?
By Golconda! let me read it once. Halloa! here's signs and wonders truly! That, now, is what old
Bowditch in his Epitome calls the zodiac, and what my almanac below calls ditto. I'll get the
almanac and as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll's arithmetic, I'll try my hand at raising
a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar. Here's the book.
Let's see now. Signs and wonders; and the sun, he's always among 'em. Hem, hem, hem; here
they are—here they go—all alive:—Aries, or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull and Jimimi! here's
Gemini himself, or the Twins. Well; the sun he wheels among 'em. Aye, here on the coin he's just
crossing the threshold between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring. Book! you lie there; the fact
is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in
to supply the thoughts. That's my small experience, so far as the Massachusetts calendar, and
Bowditch's navigator, and Daboll's arithmetic go. Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if there is nothing
wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders! There's a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist—hark! By
Jove, I have it! Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter; and
now I'll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To begin: there's Aries, or the Ram
—lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull—he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini,
or the Twins—that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and
drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path—he gives a few
fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that's our first love;
we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales—happiness
weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as
Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound, when whang come the
arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand
aside! here's the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong
we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us;
and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep. There's a sermon now, writ in high heaven,
and the sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty. Jollily he, aloft
there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so, alow here, does jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly's the word for
aye! Adieu, Doubloon! But stop; here comes little King-Post; dodge round the try-works, now, and
let's hear what he'll have to say. There; he's before it; he'll out with something presently. So, so; he's
beginning."
"I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises a certain whale, this
round thing belongs to him. So, what's all this staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that's
true; and at two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won't smoke dirty pipes like
Stubb, but I like cigars, and here's nine hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy
'em out."
 "Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a foolish look to it; yet, if it be really
foolish, then has it a sort of wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman—the old
hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. He luffs up before the
doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other side of the mast; why, there's a horse-shoe nailed
on that side; and now he's back again; what does that mean? Hark! he's muttering—voice like an
old worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!"
"If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the sun stands in some one
of these signs. I've studied signs, and know their marks; they were taught me two score years ago,
by the old witch in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then be? The horse-shoe sign; for
there it is, right opposite the gold. And what's the horse-shoe sign? The lion is the horse-shoe sign
—the roaring and devouring lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee."
"There's another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men in one kind of world, you see.
Dodge again! here comes Queequeg—all tattooing—looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself.
What says the Cannibal? As I live he's comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone; thinks the sun is
in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon's Astronomy
in the back country. And by Jove, he's found something there in the vicinity of his thigh—I guess it's
Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don't know what to make of the doubloon; he takes it for an old
button off some king's trowsers. But, aside again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled
out of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual. What does he say, with that look of
his? Ah, only makes a sign to the sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin—fire
worshipper, depend upon it. Ho! more and more. This way comes Pip—poor boy! would he had
died, or I; he's half horrible to me. He too has been watching all of these interpreters—myself
included—and look now, he comes to read, with that unearthly idiot face. Stand away again and
hear him. Hark!"
"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."
"Upon my soul, he's been studying Murray's Grammar! Improving his mind, poor fellow! But
what's that he says now—hist!"
"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."
"Why, he's getting it by heart—hist! again."
"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."
"Well, that's funny."
"And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I'm a crow, especially when I stand
a'top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain't I a crow? And where's the scare-
crow? There he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the
sleeves of an old jacket."
"Wonder if he means me?—complimentary!—poor lad!—I could go hang myself. Any way, for
the present, I'll quit Pip's vicinity. I can stand the rest, for they have plain wits; but he's too crazy-witty
for my sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering."
"Here's the ship's navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire to unscrew it. But, unscrew
your navel, and what's the consequence? Then again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when
aught's nailed to the mast it's a sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha! old Ahab! the White
Whale; he'll nail ye! This is a pine tree. My father, in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once,
and found a silver ring grown over in it; some old darkey's wedding ring. How did it get there? And
so they'll say in the resurrection, when they come to fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon
lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious, gold!
the green miser'll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes 'mong the worlds blackberrying. Cook! ho,
cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done!"
 CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.
The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London.
"Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?"
So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours, bearing down under the stern.
Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly
revealed to the stranger captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat's bow. He was a
darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious
roundabout, that hung round him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket
streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar's surcoat.
"Hast seen the White Whale!"
"See you this?" and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it, he held up a white arm of
sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like a mallet.
"Man my boat!" cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near him—"Stand by to
lower!"
In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his crew were dropped to the water,
and were soon alongside of the stranger. But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the
excitement of the moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never once
stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was always by an ingenious and
very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and
shipped in any other vessel at a moment's warning. Now, it is no very easy matter for anybody
—except those who are almost hourly used to it, like whalemen—to clamber up a ship's side from
a boat on the open sea; for the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and
then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. So, deprived of one leg, and the strange
ship of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself
abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height he
could hardly hope to attain.
It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward circumstance that befell him, and
which indirectly sprang from his luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab.
And in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the two officers of the strange
ship, leaning over the side, by the perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging
towards him a pair of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem to bethink
them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to use their sea bannisters. But this
awkwardness only lasted a minute, because the strange captain, observing at a glance how affairs
stood, cried out, "I see, I see!—avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing over the cutting-
tackle."
As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two previous, and the great
tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached
to the end. This was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his solitary
thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in the fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple
tree), and then giving the word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his own
weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running parts of the tackle. Soon he was
carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and gently landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory
arm frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his ivory leg,
and crossing the ivory arm (like two sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way, "Aye, aye,
hearty! let us shake bones together!—an arm and a leg!—an arm that never can shrink, d'ye see;
and a leg that never can run. Where did'st thou see the White Whale?—how long ago?"
"The White Whale," said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards the East, and taking a
rueful sight along it, as if it had been a telescope; "there I saw him, on the Line, last season."
"And he took that arm off, did he?" asked Ahab, now sliding down from the capstan, and resting
on the Englishman's shoulder, as he did so.
"Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?"
"Spin me the yarn," said Ahab; "how was it?"
"It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line," began the Englishman. "I was
ignorant of the White Whale at that time. Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales,
and my boat fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went milling and
milling round so, that my boat's crew could only trim dish, by sitting all their sterns on the outer
gunwale. Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-
white head and hump, all crows' feet and wrinkles."
"It was he, it was he!" cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended breath.
"And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin."
"Aye, aye—they were mine—MY irons," cried Ahab, exultingly—"but on!"
"Give me a chance, then," said the Englishman, good-humoredly. "Well, this old great-
grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam into the pod, and goes to snapping
furiously at my fast-line!
"Aye, I see!—wanted to part it; free the fast-fish—an old trick—I know him."
"How it was exactly," continued the one-armed commander, "I do not know; but in biting the line,
it got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow; but we didn't know it then; so that when we
afterwards pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other whale's;
that went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters stood, and what a noble great whale it
was—the noblest and biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life—I resolved to capture him, spite of the
boiling rage he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would get loose, or the tooth it
was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a boat's crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all
this, I say, I jumped into my first mate's boat—Mr. Mounttop's here (by the way, Captain—Mounttop;
Mounttop—the captain);—as I was saying, I jumped into Mounttop's boat, which, d'ye see, was
gunwale and gunwale with mine, then; and snatching the first harpoon, let this old great-grandfather
have it. But, Lord, look you, sir—hearts and souls alive, man—the next instant, in a jiff, I was blind
as a bat—both eyes out—all befogged and bedeadened with black foam—the whale's tail looming
straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I
was groping at midday, with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after the
second iron, to toss it overboard—down comes the tail like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two,
leaving each half in splinters; and, flukes first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though
it was all chips. We all struck out. To escape his terrible flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole
sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking fish. But a combing sea dashed me
off, and at the same instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down like a flash; and the
barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me caught me here" (clapping his hand just
below his shoulder); "yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell's flames, I was
thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good God, the barb ript its way along the flesh
—clear along the whole length of my arm—came out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;—and that
gentleman there will tell you the rest (by the way, captain—Dr. Bunger, ship's surgeon: Bunger, my
lad,—the captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the yarn."
The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all the time standing near them,
with nothing specific visible, to denote his gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly
round but sober one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched trowsers;
and had thus far been dividing his attention between a marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-
box held in the other, occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two crippled
captains. But, at his superior's introduction of him to Ahab, he politely bowed, and straightway went
on to do his captain's bidding.
"It was a shocking bad wound," began the whale-surgeon; "and, taking my advice, Captain
Boomer here, stood our old Sammy—"
"Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship," interrupted the one-armed captain, addressing Ahab;
"go on, boy."
"Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot weather there on the
Line. But it was no use—I did all I could; sat up with him nights; was very severe with him in the
matter of diet—"
"Oh, very severe!" chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly altering his voice, "Drinking hot
rum toddies with me every night, till he couldn't see to put on the bandages; and sending me to
bed, half seas over, about three o'clock in the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat up with me indeed, and
was very severe in my diet. Oh! a great watcher, and very dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger.
(Bunger, you dog, laugh out! why don't ye? You know you're a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave
ahead, boy, I'd rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other man."
"My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir"—said the imperturbable godly-
looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab—"is apt to be facetious at times; he spins us many clever
things of that sort. But I may as well say—en passant, as the French remark—that I myself—that is
to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend clergy—am a strict total abstinence man; I never drink—"
"Water!" cried the captain; "he never drinks it; it's a sort of fits to him; fresh water throws him into
the hydrophobia; but go on—go on with the arm story."
"Yes, I may as well," said the surgeon, coolly. "I was about observing, sir, before Captain
Boomer's facetious interruption, that spite of my best and severest endeavors, the wound kept
getting worse and worse; the truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw;
more than two feet and several inches long. I measured it with the lead line. In short, it grew black; I
knew what was threatened, and off it came. But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that
thing is against all rule"—pointing at it with the marlingspike—"that is the captain's work, not mine;
he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had that club-hammer there put to the end, to knock some
one's brains out with, I suppose, as he tried mine once. He flies into diabolical passions
sometimes. Do ye see this dent, sir"—removing his hat, and brushing aside his hair, and exposing
a bowl-like cavity in his skull, but which bore not the slightest scarry trace, or any token of ever
having been a wound—"Well, the captain there will tell you how that came here; he knows."
"No, I don't," said the captain, "but his mother did; he was born with it. Oh, you solemn rogue, you
—you Bunger! was there ever such another Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you
ought to die in pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal."
"What became of the White Whale?" now cried Ahab, who thus far had been impatiently
listening to this by-play between the two Englishmen.
"Oh!" cried the one-armed captain, "oh, yes! Well; after he sounded, we didn't see him again for
some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I didn't then know what whale it was that had served me such
a trick, till some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about Moby Dick—as
some call him—and then I knew it was he."
"Did'st thou cross his wake again?"
"Twice."
"But could not fasten?"
"Didn't want to try to: ain't one limb enough? What should I do without this other arm? And I'm
thinking Moby Dick doesn't bite so much as he swallows."
"Well, then," interrupted Bunger, "give him your left arm for bait to get the right. Do you know,
gentlemen"—very gravely and mathematically bowing to each Captain in succession—"Do you
know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine
Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest even a man's arm? And he
knows it too. So that what you take for the White Whale's malice is only his awkwardness. For he
never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But sometimes he is like
the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-
knives, once upon a time let one drop into him in good earnest, and there it stayed for a
twelvemonth or more; when I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in small tacks, d'ye see. No
possible way for him to digest that jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his general bodily system.
Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about it, and have a mind to pawn one arm for the
sake of the privilege of giving decent burial to the other, why in that case the arm is yours; only let
the whale have another chance at you shortly, that's all."
"No, thank ye, Bunger," said the English Captain, "he's welcome to the arm he has, since I can't
help it, and didn't know him then; but not to another one. No more White Whales for me; I've
lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me. There would be great glory in killing him, I know
that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he's best let alone; don't you
think so, Captain?"—glancing at the ivory leg.
"He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not
always what least allures. He's all a magnet! How long since thou saw'st him last? Which way
heading?"
"Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend's," cried Bunger, stoopingly walking round Ahab, and like
a dog, strangely snuffing; "this man's blood—bring the thermometer!—it's at the boiling point!—his
pulse makes these planks beat!—sir!"—taking a lancet from his pocket, and drawing near to
Ahab's arm.
"Avast!" roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks—"Man the boat! Which way heading?"
"Good God!" cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put. "What's the matter? He
was heading east, I think.—Is your Captain crazy?" whispering Fedallah.
But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to take the boat's steering oar, and
Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle towards him, commanded the ship's sailors to stand by to lower.
In a moment he was standing in the boat's stern, and the Manilla men were springing to their
oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him. With back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint
to his own, Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod.
 CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.
Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she hailed from London, and was
named after the late Samuel Enderby, merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling
house of Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion, comes not far behind
the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point of real historical interest. How long,
prior to the year of our Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous fish-
documents do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted out the first English ships that ever
regularly hunted the Sperm Whale; though for some score of years previous (ever since 1726) our
valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard had in large fleets pursued that
Leviathan, but only in the North and South Atlantic: not elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here,
that the Nantucketers were the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the great Sperm
Whale; and that for half a century they were the only people of the whole globe who so harpooned
him.
In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose, and at the sole charge of the
vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a
whale-boat of any sort in the great South Sea. The voyage was a skilful and lucky one; and
returning to her berth with her hold full of the precious sperm, the Amelia's example was soon
followed by other ships, English and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the
Pacific were thrown open. But not content with this good deed, the indefatigable house again
bestirred itself: Samuel and all his Sons—how many, their mother only knows—and under their
immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their expense, the British government was induced to
send the sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery into the South Sea. Commanded
by a naval Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and did some service; how much
does not appear. But this is not all. In 1819, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of
their own, to go on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That ship—well called the
"Syren"—made a noble experimental cruise; and it was thus that the great Japanese Whaling
Ground first became generally known. The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded by a
Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer.
All honour to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to the present day; though
doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the
other world.
The ship named after him was worthy of the honour, being a very fast sailer and a noble craft
every way. I boarded her once at midnight somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good
flip down in the forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps—every soul on
board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine gam I had—long, very long after old Ahab
touched her planks with his ivory heel—it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that
ship; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever lose sight of it. Flip? Did I
say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came
(for it's squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands—visitors and all—were called to reef
topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly
furled the skirts of our jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the howling gale, a
warning example to all drunken tars. However, the masts did not go overboard; and by and by we
scrambled down, so sober, that we had to pass the flip again, though the savage salt spray
bursting down the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it to my taste.
The beef was fine—tough, but with body in it. They said it was bull-beef; others, that it was
dromedary beef; but I do not know, for certain, how that was. They had dumplings too; small, but
substantial, symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you could feel them,
and roll them about in you after they were swallowed. If you stooped over too far forward, you
risked their pitching out of you like billiard-balls. The bread—but that couldn't be helped; besides, it
was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread contained the only fresh fare they had. But the forecastle
was not very light, and it was very easy to step over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all in all,
taking her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions of the cook's boilers, including his own
live parchment boilers; fore and aft, I say, the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship; of good fare and
plenty; fine flip and strong; crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to hat-band.
But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other English whalers I know of
—not all though—were such famous, hospitable ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread,
and the can, and the joke; and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking, and laughing? I will tell
you. The abounding good cheer of these English whalers is matter for historical research. Nor
have I been at all sparing of historical whale research, when it has seemed needed.
The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders, Zealanders, and Danes; from
whom they derived many terms still extant in the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions,
touching plenty to eat and drink. For, as a general thing, the English merchant-ship scrimps her
crew; but not so the English whaler. Hence, in the English, this thing of whaling good cheer is not
normal and natural, but incidental and particular; and, therefore, must have some special origin,
which is here pointed out, and will be still further elucidated.
During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an ancient Dutch volume,
which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about whalers. The title was, "Dan
Coopman," wherefore I concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam
cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I was reinforced in this opinion by
seeing that it was the production of one "Fitz Swackhammer." But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very
learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and St.
Pott's, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box of sperm candles for his trouble
—this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the book, assured me that "Dan Coopman" did
not mean "The Cooper," but "The Merchant." In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch book
treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained a very interesting
account of its whale fishery. And in this chapter it was, headed, "Smeer," or "Fat," that I found a
long detailed list of the outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from which
list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following:
400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock fish. 550,000 lbs. of
biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins of butter. 20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese.
144,000 lbs. cheese (probably an inferior article). 550 ankers of Geneva. 10,800 barrels of beer.
Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in the present case, however,
where the reader is flooded with whole pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good
cheer.
At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this beer, beef, and bread,
during which many profound thoughts were incidentally suggested to me, capable of a
transcendental and Platonic application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my
own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by every Low Dutch harpooneer
in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and
Texel and Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their naturally
unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous by the nature of their vocation, and especially
by their pursuing their game in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux
country where the convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil.
The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those polar fisheries could only
be prosecuted in the short summer of that climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch
whalemen, including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed three
months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch
seamen in all; therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks'
allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin. Now, whether these gin and
beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to
stand up in a boat's head, and take good aim at flying whales; this would seem somewhat
improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But this was very far North, be it
remembered, where beer agrees well with the constitution; upon the Equator, in our southern
fishery, beer would be apt to make the harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his boat;
and grievous loss might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford.
But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers of two or three centuries
ago were high livers; and that the English whalers have not neglected so excellent an example. For,
say they, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good
dinner out of it, at least. And this empties the decanter.
 CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.
Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt upon the marvels of his
outer aspect; or separately and in detail upon some few interior structural features. But to a large
and thorough sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still further,
and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the
eyes of the joints of his innermost bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his
unconditional skeleton.
But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery, pretend to know aught
about the subterranean parts of the whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver
lectures on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a specimen rib for
exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land a full-grown whale on your deck for examination,
as a cook dishes a roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been, Ishmael; but
have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone; the privilege of discoursing upon the joists
and beams; the rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of
leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels.
I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far beneath the skin of the adult
whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I
belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag, to
make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the lances. Think you I let that
chance go, without using my boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the
contents of that young cub?
And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their gigantic, full grown
development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of
Tranque, one of the Arsacides. For being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship
Dey of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the lord of Tranque, at
his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side glen not very far distant from what our sailors called
Bamboo-Town, his capital.
Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted with a devout love for all
matters of barbaric vertu, had brought together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious
of his people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices, chiselled shells, inlaid
spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes; and all these distributed among whatever natural
wonders, the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.
Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an unusually long raging gale,
had been found dead and stranded, with his head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like,
tufted droopings seemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of its
fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun, then the skeleton was carefully
transported up the Pupella glen, where a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.
The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with Arsacidean annals, in strange
hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic
head again sent forth its vapoury spout; while, suspended from a bough, the terrific lower jaw
vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles.
It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the trees stood high
and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom, with a
gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living
flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and
grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the
leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver!
unseen weaver!—pause!—one word!—whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck?
wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single word with
thee! Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever
slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no
mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we
escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material
factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are
plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been
detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world's loom, thy subtlest
thinkings may be overheard afar.
Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the great, white, worshipped
skeleton lay lounging—a gigantic idler! Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed
and hummed around him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven over with
the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but himself a skeleton. Life folded
Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed
glories.
Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the skull an altar, and the
artificial smoke ascending from where the real jet had issued, I marvelled that the king should
regard a chapel as an object of vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled that the priests should
swear that smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro I paced before this skeleton—brushed the
vines aside—broke through the ribs—and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long
amid its many winding, shaded colonnades and arbours. But soon my line was out; and following it
back, I emerged from the opening where I entered. I saw no living thing within; naught was there but
bones.
Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton. From their arrow-slit in
the skull, the priests perceived me taking the altitude of the final rib, "How now!" they shouted;
"Dar'st thou measure this our god! That's for us." "Aye, priests—well, how long do ye make him,
then?" But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them, concerning feet and inches; they cracked
each other's sconces with their yard-sticks—the great skull echoed—and seizing that lucky
chance, I quickly concluded my own admeasurements.
These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be it recorded, that, in this
matter, I am not free to utter any fancied measurement I please. Because there are skeleton
authorities you can refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in
Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have some fine specimens of fin-
backs and other whales. Likewise, I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New
Hampshire, they have what the proprietors call "the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or River
Whale in the United States." Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by
name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but
of moderate size, by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo's.
In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons belonged, were originally
claimed by their proprietors upon similar grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it;
and Sir Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir Clifford's whale has
been articulated throughout; so that, like a great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all
his bony cavities—spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan—and swing all day upon his lower jaw.
Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and a footman will show round
future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep
at the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his
cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead.
The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right
arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure
way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other
parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing—at least, what
untattooed parts might remain—I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should
inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.
 CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton.
In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain statement, touching the living bulk of
this leviathan, whose skeleton we are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.
According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base upon Captain Scoresby's
estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to
my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between eighty-five and
ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will
weigh at least ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably outweigh
the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants.
Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this leviathan, to make him at all
budge to any landsman's imagination?
Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole, jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins,
and divers other parts, I shall now simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of
his unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very large a proportion of the entire
extent of the skeleton; as it is by far the most complicated part; and as nothing is to be repeated
concerning it in this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your arm, as we
proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion of the general structure we are about to
view.
In length, the Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two Feet; so that when fully
invested and extended in life, he must have been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton
loses about one fifth in length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two feet, his skull and
jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain back-bone. Attached to this back-
bone, for something less than a third of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once
enclosed his vitals.
To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine, extending far away from it in a
straight line, not a little resembled the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only
some twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the time, but a long,
disconnected timber.
The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was nearly six feet long; the
second, third, and fourth were each successively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or
one of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From that part, the remaining
ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only spanned five feet and some inches. In general thickness,
they all bore a seemly correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most arched. In
some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay footpath bridges over small
streams.
In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the circumstance, so variously
repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form.
The largest of the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish which, in life,
is greatest in depth. Now, the greatest depth of the invested body of this particular whale must
have been at least sixteen feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight
feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion of the living magnitude of that part.
Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped round
with tons of added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels. Still more, for the ample fins, I here
saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an
utter blank!
How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this
wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful
wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes;
only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.
But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a crane, to pile its bones high up
on end. No speedy enterprise. But now it's done, it looks much like Pompey's Pillar.
There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are not locked together. They
mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy
masonry. The largest, a middle one, is in width something less than three feet, and in depth more
than four. The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and
looks something like a white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, but they had
been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles
with. Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple
child's play.
 CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.
From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and
generally expatiate. Would you, you could not compress him. By good rights he should only be
treated of in imperial folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he
measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines, where they lie in
him like great cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-
ship.
Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me to approve myself
omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood,
and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him in most of
his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in an
archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the
Leviathan—to an ant or a flea—such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably
grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this
emprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has
been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge
quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous
lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a
whale author like me.
One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an
ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands
into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends,
hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and
make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole
circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present,
and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole
universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal
theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No
great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by
stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of
ditches, canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of
preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier geological strata there are found
the fossils of monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what
are called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate intercepted links, between
the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all
the Fossil Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last preceding the
superficial formations. And though none of them precisely answer to any known species of the
present time, they are yet sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking rank as
Cetacean fossils.
Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones and skeletons, have
within thirty years past, at various intervals, been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in
France, in England, in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Among
the more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the year 1779 was disinterred in the
Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and
bones disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon's time. Cuvier
pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some utterly unknown Leviathanic species.
But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost complete vast skeleton of an
extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-
stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels. The
Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But
some specimen bones of it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned
out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed species. A significant illustration of
the fact, again and again repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little
clue to the shape of his fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in
his paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance, one of the
most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence.
When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae,
all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same
time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their
incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be
said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain
dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard
upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world's circumference, not an
inhabitable hand's breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whale's; and, king of
creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show
a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah
seems a school-boy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic,
unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time,
must needs exist after all humane ages are over.
But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the stereotype plates of nature,
and in limestone and marl bequeathed his ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity
seems to claim for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable print of his fin.
In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon
the granite ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and
dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding among
them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before
Solomon was cradled.
Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of the whale, in his own
osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.
"Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams of which are made of
Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The
Common People imagine, that by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the temple, no Whale
can pass it without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, that on either side of the Temple,
there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into the Sea, and wound the Whales when they light upon 'em.
They keep a Whale's Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with its
convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be reached by a Man upon a
Camel's Back. This Rib (says John Leo) is said to have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it.
Their Historians affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy'd of Mahomet, came from this Temple, and
some do not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at the Base of the
Temple."
In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a Nantucketer, and a
whaleman, you will silently worship there.
 CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish?
—Will He Perish?
Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from the head-waters of the
Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether, in the long course of his generations, he has not
degenerated from the original bulk of his sires.
But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the present day superior in
magnitude to those whose fossil remains are found in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct
geological period prior to man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those belonging to
its latter formations exceed in size those of its earlier ones.
Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the Alabama one mentioned in
the last chapter, and that was less than seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have
already seen, that the tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a large sized
modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen's authority, that Sperm Whales have been captured
near a hundred feet long at the time of capture.
But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an advance in magnitude upon
those of all previous geological periods; may it not be, that since Adam's time they have
degenerated?
Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such gentlemen as Pliny, and
the ancient naturalists generally. For Pliny tells us of Whales that embraced acres of living bulk,
and Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred feet in length—Rope Walks and Thames
Tunnels of Whales! And even in the days of Banks and Solander, Cooke's naturalists, we find a
Danish member of the Academy of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur,
or Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards; that is, three hundred and sixty feet. And
Lacepede, the French naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales, in the very beginning of his
work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale at one hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight
feet. And this work was published so late as A.D. 1825.
But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is as big as his ancestors
in Pliny's time. And if ever I go where Pliny is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to
tell him so. Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies that were
buried thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not measure so much in their coffins as
a modern Kentuckian in his socks; and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest
Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in which they are drawn, just as plainly
prove that the high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle of Smithfield, not only equal, but far exceed in
magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh's fat kine; in the face of all this, I will not admit that of all animals
the whale alone should have degenerated.
But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more recondite Nantucketers.
Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs at the mast-heads of the whaleships, now
penetrating even through Behring's straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the
world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental coasts; the moot point is,
whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he
must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his
last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.
Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years
ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron
manes and scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals,
where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible
argument would seem furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy
extinction.
 But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a period ago—not a good lifetime
—the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at
the present day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of
this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt
peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the
Sperm Whales for forty-eight months think they have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last
they carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian and Indian hunters
and trappers of the West, when the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and
a virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of months, mounted on horse
instead of sailing in ships, would have slain not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact
that, if need were, could be statistically stated.
Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the gradual extinction of the
Sperm Whale, for example, that in former years (the latter part of the last century, say) these
Leviathans, in small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in consequence,
the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more remunerative. Because, as has
been elsewhere noticed, those whales, influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in
immense caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, and
schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but widely separated, unfrequent armies. That
is all. And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no
longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with them, hence that species also is
declining. For they are only being driven from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer
enlivened with their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very recently
startled by the unfamiliar spectacle.
Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two firm fortresses, which,
in all human probability, will for ever remain impregnable. And as upon the invasion of their valleys,
the frosty Swiss have retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas and glades of the
middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort to their Polar citadels, and diving under the
ultimate glassy barriers and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed
circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.
But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one cachalot, some
philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this positive havoc has already very seriously
diminished their battalions. But though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than
13,000, have been annually slain on the nor'-west coast by the Americans alone; yet there are
considerations which render even this circumstance of little or no account as an opposing
argument in this matter.
Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness of the more enormous
creatures of the globe, yet what shall we say to Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at
one hunting the King of Siam took 4,000 elephants; that in those regions elephants are numerous
as droves of cattle in the temperate climes. And there seems no reason to doubt that if these
elephants, which have now been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by
Hannibal, and by all the successive monarchs of the East—if they still survive there in great
numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all hunting, since he has a pasture to expatiate
in, which is precisely twice as large as all Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland,
and all the Isles of the sea combined.
Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity of whales, their probably
attaining the age of a century and more, therefore at any one period of time, several distinct adult
generations must be contemporary. And what that is, we may soon gain some idea of, by
imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults of creation yielding up the live bodies
of all the men, women, and children who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this
countless host to the present human population of the globe.
Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however
perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once swam
over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah's flood he despised
Noah's Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then
the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout
his frothed defiance to the skies.
 CHAPTER 106. Ahab's Leg.
The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel Enderby of London,
had not been unattended with some small violence to his own person. He had lighted with such
energy upon a thwart of his boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock. And when
after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there, he so vehemently wheeled round with an
urgent command to the steersman (it was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly
enough); then, the already shaken ivory received such an additional twist and wrench, that though it
still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.
And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his pervading, mad recklessness,
Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood.
For it had not been very long prior to the Pequod's sailing from Nantucket, that he had been found
one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible; by some unknown, and seemingly
inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had
stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme difficulty that the
agonizing wound was entirely cured.
Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then
present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that
as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest
songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their
like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further
than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from certain
canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for
the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell's despair;
whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally
progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an
inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly
felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a
mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out
not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us
at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-
making suns, and soft cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the
gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but
the stamp of sorrow in the signers.
Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more properly, in set way,
have been disclosed before. With many other particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained
a mystery to some, why it was, that for a certain period, both before and after the sailing of the
Pequod, he had hidden himself away with such Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness; and, for that one
interval, sought speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble senate of the dead. Captain
Peleg's bruited reason for this thing appeared by no means adequate; though, indeed, as touching
all Ahab's deeper part, every revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory
light. But, in the end, it all came out; this one matter did, at least. That direful mishap was at the
bottom of his temporary recluseness. And not only this, but to that ever-contracting, dropping circle
ashore, who, for any reason, possessed the privilege of a less banned approach to him; to that
timid circle the above hinted casualty—remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted for by Ahab
—invested itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the land of spirits and of wails. So that,
through their zeal for him, they had all conspired, so far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge
of this thing from others; and hence it was, that not till a considerable interval had elapsed, did it
transpire upon the Pequod's decks.
But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air, or the vindictive princes and
potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took
plain practical procedures;—he called the carpenter.
 And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without delay set about making a
new leg, and directed the mates to see him supplied with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory
(Sperm Whale) which had thus far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a careful
selection of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be secured. This done, the carpenter
received orders to have the leg completed that night; and to provide all the fittings for it,
independent of those pertaining to the distrusted one in use. Moreover, the ship's forge was
ordered to be hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the hold; and, to accelerate the affair, the
blacksmith was commanded to proceed at once to the forging of whatever iron contrivances might
be needed.
 CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and
he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and
for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of the high, humane
abstraction; the Pequod's carpenter was no duplicate; hence, he now comes in person on this
stage.
Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to whaling vessels, he
was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent, alike experienced in numerous trades and callings
collateral to his own; the carpenter's pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those
numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an auxiliary material. But,
besides the application to him of the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was
singularly efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a
large ship, upon a three or four years' voyage, in uncivilized and far-distant seas. For not to speak
of his readiness in ordinary duties:—repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of
clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull's eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and other
miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover
unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious.
The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold, was his vice-bench; a
long rude ponderous table furnished with several vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of
wood. At all times except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed
athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.
A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: the carpenter claps it into one
of his ever-ready vices, and straightway files it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays
on board, and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams
of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking cage for it. An oarsman sprains his
wrist: the carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars to be painted upon
the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his big vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically
supplies the constellation. A sailor takes a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills
his ears. Another has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping one hand upon his
bench bids him be seated there; but the poor fellow unmanageably winces under the unconcluded
operation; whirling round the handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in
that, if he would have him draw the tooth.
Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent and without respect in all.
Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held
for capstans. But while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such
liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of
intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain
impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of
things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which
while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you,
though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too,
as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness;—yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old,
crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a certain
grizzled wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time during the midnight watch on the
bearded forecastle of Noah's ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long wanderer,
whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off
whatever small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract;
an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe; living without premeditated
reference to this world or the next. You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in
him involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so much
by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all
these, even or uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He
was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the
muscles of his fingers. He was like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, MULTUM IN
PARVO, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior—though a little swelled—of a common
pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws,
tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the
carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part of him, and the screw was
fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs, and there they were.
Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was, after all, no mere
machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that
somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops
of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had abided for now some sixty years
or more. And this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that
kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also
hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there,
and talking all the time to keep himself awake.
 CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.
The Deck—First Night Watch.
(CARPENTER STANDING BEFORE HIS VICE-BENCH, AND BY THE LIGHT OF TWO
LANTERNS BUSILY FILING THE IVORY JOIST FOR THE LEG, WHICH JOIST IS FIRMLY FIXED
IN THE VICE. SLABS OF IVORY, LEATHER STRAPS, PADS, SCREWS, AND VARIOUS TOOLS
OF ALL SORTS LYING ABOUT THE BENCH. FORWARD, THE RED FLAME OF THE FORGE IS
SEEN, WHERE THE BLACKSMITH IS AT WORK.)
Drat the file, and drat the bone! That is hard which should be soft, and that is soft which should
be hard. So we go, who file old jaws and shinbones. Let's try another. Aye, now, this works better
(SNEEZES). Halloa, this bone dust is (SNEEZES)—why it's (SNEEZES)—yes it's (SNEEZES)
—bless my soul, it won't let me speak! This is what an old fellow gets now for working in dead
lumber. Saw a live tree, and you don't get this dust; amputate a live bone, and you don't get it
(SNEEZES). Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let's have that ferule and buckle-
screw; I'll be ready for them presently. Lucky now (SNEEZES) there's no knee-joint to make; that
might puzzle a little; but a mere shinbone—why it's easy as making hop-poles; only I should like to
put a good finish on. Time, time; if I but only had the time, I could turn him out as neat a leg now as
ever (SNEEZES) scraped to a lady in a parlor. Those buckskin legs and calves of legs I've seen in
shop windows wouldn't compare at all. They soak water, they do; and of course get rheumatic, and
have to be doctored (SNEEZES) with washes and lotions, just like live legs. There; before I saw it
off, now, I must call his old Mogulship, and see whether the length will be all right; too short, if
anything, I guess. Ha! that's the heel; we are in luck; here he comes, or it's somebody else, that's
certain.
AHAB (ADVANCING)
(DURING THE ENSUING SCENE, THE CARPENTER CONTINUES SNEEZING AT TIMES)
Well, manmaker!
Just in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length. Let me measure, sir.
Measured for a leg! good. Well, it's not the first time. About it! There; keep thy finger on it. This is
a cogent vice thou hast here, carpenter; let me feel its grip once. So, so; it does pinch some.
Oh, sir, it will break bones—beware, beware!
No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man.
What's Prometheus about there?—the blacksmith, I mean—what's he about?
He must be forging the buckle-screw, sir, now.
Right. It's a partnership; he supplies the muscle part. He makes a fierce red flame there!
Aye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of fine work.
Um-m. So he must. I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that old Greek, Prometheus,
who made men, they say, should have been a blacksmith, and animated them with fire; for what's
made in fire must properly belong to fire; and so hell's probable. How the soot flies! This must be
the remainder the Greek made the Africans of. Carpenter, when he's through with that buckle, tell
him to forge a pair of steel shoulder-blades; there's a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack.
Sir?
Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I'll order a complete man after a desirable pattern. Imprimis,
fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to
'em, to stay in one place; then, arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at all, brass forehead,
and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let me see—shall I order eyes to see outwards?
and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let me see—shall I order eyes to see outwards?
No, but put a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards. There, take the order, and away.
Now, what's he speaking about, and who's he speaking to, I should like to know? Shall I keep
standing here? (ASIDE).
'Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here's one. No, no, no; I must have a
lantern.
Ho, ho! That's it, hey? Here are two, sir; one will serve my turn.
What art thou thrusting that thief-catcher into my face for, man? Thrusted light is worse than
presented pistols.
I thought, sir, that you spoke to carpenter.
Carpenter? why that's—but no;—a very tidy, and, I may say, an extremely gentlemanlike sort of
business thou art in here, carpenter;—or would'st thou rather work in clay?
Sir?—Clay? clay, sir? That's mud; we leave clay to ditchers, sir.
The fellow's impious! What art thou sneezing about?
Bone is rather dusty, sir.
Take the hint, then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself under living people's noses.
Sir?—oh! ah!—I guess so;—yes—dear!
Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good workmanlike workman, eh? Well,
then, will it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall
nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that is, carpenter, my old lost leg;
the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?
Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard something curious on that
score, sir; how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be
still pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?
It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once was; so, now, here is only one
distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there
to a hair, do I. Is't a riddle?
I should humbly call it a poser, sir.
Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and
uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy
spite? In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don't speak! And if I
still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou,
carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!
Good Lord! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over again; I think I didn't carry a small
figure, sir.
Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises.—How long before the leg is done?
Perhaps an hour, sir.
Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me (TURNS TO GO). Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as Greek
god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-
indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I'm down in the whole
world's books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Praetorians at the
auction of the Roman empire (which was the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I
brag with. By heavens! I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small,
compendious vertebra. So.
 CARPENTER (RESUMING HIS WORK).
Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he's queer; says nothing but
that one sufficient little word queer; he's queer, says Stubb; he's queer—queer, queer; and keeps
dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the time—queer—sir—queer, queer, very queer. And here's his leg!
Yes, now that I think of it, here's his bedfellow! has a stick of whale's jaw-bone for a wife! And this
is his leg; he'll stand on this. What was that now about one leg standing in three places, and all
three places standing in one hell—how was that? Oh! I don't wonder he looked so scornful at me!
I'm a sort of strange-thoughted sometimes, they say; but that's only haphazard-like. Then, a short,
little old body like me, should never undertake to wade out into deep waters with tall, heron-built
captains; the water chucks you under the chin pretty quick, and there's a great cry for life-boats.
And here's the heron's leg! long and slim, sure enough! Now, for most folks one pair of legs lasts a
lifetime, and that must be because they use them mercifully, as a tender-hearted old lady uses her
roly-poly old coach-horses. But Ahab; oh he's a hard driver. Look, driven one leg to death, and
spavined the other for life, and now wears out bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there, you Smut! bear
a hand there with those screws, and let's finish it before the resurrection fellow comes a-calling with
his horn for all legs, true or false, as brewery-men go round collecting old beer barrels, to fill 'em up
again. What a leg this is! It looks like a real live leg, filed down to nothing but the core; he'll be
standing on this to-morrow; he'll be taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot the little oval slate,
smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude. So, so; chisel, file, and sand-paper, now!
 CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
According to usage they were pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no inconsiderable oil
came up with the water; the casks below must have sprung a bad leak. Much concern was shown;
and Starbuck went down into the cabin to report this unfavourable affair.*
*In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it is a regular semiweekly
duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench the casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at
varying intervals, is removed by the ship's pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept damply
tight; while by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the mariners readily detect any
serious leakage in the precious cargo.
Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and the Bashee Isles,
between which lies one of the tropical outlets from the China waters into the Pacific. And so
Starbuck found Ahab with a general chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him; and
another separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the Japanese islands—Niphon,
Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his
table, and with a long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his back
to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old courses again.
"Who's there?" hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round to it. "On deck! Begone!"
"Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir. We must up Burtons and break
out."
"Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to here for a week to tinker
a parcel of old hoops?"
"Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make good in a year. What we
come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving, sir."
"So it is, so it is; if we get it."
"I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir."
"And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it leak! I'm all aleak myself. Aye!
leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that's a far
worse plight than the Pequod's, man. Yet I don't stop to plug my leak; for who can find it in the
deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if found, in this life's howling gale? Starbuck! I'll not
have the Burtons hoisted."
"What will the owners say, sir?"
"Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What cares Ahab? Owners,
owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners
were my conscience. But look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye,
my conscience is in this ship's keel.—On deck!"
"Captain Ahab," said the reddening mate, moving further into the cabin, with a daring so
strangely respectful and cautious that it almost seemed not only every way seeking to avoid the
slightest outward manifestation of itself, but within also seemed more than half distrustful of itself;
"A better man than I might well pass over in thee what he would quickly enough resent in a younger
man; aye, and in a happier, Captain Ahab."
"Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?—On deck!"
"Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir—to be forbearing! Shall we not understand each
other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab?"
 Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most South-Sea-men's cabin
furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck, exclaimed: "There is one God that is Lord over the
earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.—On deck!"
For an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks, you would have almost
thought that he had really received the blaze of the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he
half calmly rose, and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: "Thou hast outraged,
not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let
Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man."
"He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!" murmured Ahab, as
Starbuck disappeared. "What's that he said—Ahab beware of Ahab—there's something there!"
Then unconsciously using the musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the little
cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and returning the gun to the rack, he
went to the deck.
"Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck," he said lowly to the mate; then raising his voice to the
crew: "Furl the t'gallant-sails, and close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft; back the main-yard; up
Burton, and break out in the main-hold."
It were perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting Starbuck, Ahab thus acted.
It may have been a flash of honesty in him; or mere prudential policy which, under the
circumstance, imperiously forbade the slightest symptom of open disaffection, however transient,
in the important chief officer of his ship. However it was, his orders were executed; and the
Burtons were hoisted.
 CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.
Upon searching, it was found that the casks last struck into the hold were perfectly sound, and
that the leak must be further off. So, it being calm weather, they broke out deeper and deeper,
disturbing the slumbers of the huge ground-tier butts; and from that black midnight sending those
gigantic moles into the daylight above. So deep did they go; and so ancient, and corroded, and
weedy the aspect of the lowermost puncheons, that you almost looked next for some mouldy
corner-stone cask containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted placards, vainly
warning the infatuated old world from the flood. Tierce after tierce, too, of water, and bread, and
beef, and shooks of staves, and iron bundles of hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks
were hard to get about; and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as if you were treading over empty
catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the sea like an air-freighted demijohn. Top-heavy was the ship
as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head. Well was it that the Typhoons did not visit them
then.
Now, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast bosom-friend, Queequeg, was
seized with a fever, which brought him nigh to his endless end.
Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown; dignity and danger go hand in
hand; till you get to be Captain, the higher you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg,
who, as harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but—as we have elsewhere
seen—mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and
bitterly sweating all day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the clumsiest
casks and see to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen, the harpooneers are the holders,
so called.
Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should have stooped over
the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where, stripped to his woollen drawers, the
tattooed savage was crawling about amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard at
the bottom of a well. And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, poor pagan; where,
strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, he caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever;
and at last, after some days' suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill of the door of
death. How he wasted and wasted away in those few long-lingering days, till there seemed but little
left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew
sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange
softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous
testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And like circles on
the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the
rings of Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this
waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who were bystanders when
Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or
books. And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last
revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell. So that—let us say it again
—no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and holier thoughts than those, whose mysterious shades
you saw creeping over the face of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his swaying hammock, and
the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his final rest, and the ocean's invisible flood-tide lifted
him higher and higher towards his destined heaven.
Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself, what he thought of his
case was forcibly shown by a curious favour he asked. He called one to him in the grey morning
watch, when the day was just breaking, and taking his hand, said that while in Nantucket he had
chanced to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich war-wood of his native isle; and
upon inquiry, he had learned that all whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same
dark canoes, and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for it was not unlike the
custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and
so left him to be floated away to the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the stars
are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with
the blue heavens; and so form the white breakers of the milky way. He added, that he shuddered at
the thought of being buried in his hammock, according to the usual sea-custom, tossed like
something vile to the death-devouring sharks. No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket, all
the more congenial to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat these coffin-canoes were
without a keel; though that involved but uncertain steering, and much lee-way adown the dim ages.
Now, when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter was at once
commanded to do Queequeg's bidding, whatever it might include. There was some heathenish,
coffin-coloured old lumber aboard, which, upon a long previous voyage, had been cut from the
aboriginal groves of the Lackaday islands, and from these dark planks the coffin was
recommended to be made. No sooner was the carpenter apprised of the order, than taking his
rule, he forthwith with all the indifferent promptitude of his character, proceeded into the forecastle
and took Queequeg's measure with great accuracy, regularly chalking Queequeg's person as he
shifted the rule.
"Ah! poor fellow! he'll have to die now," ejaculated the Long Island sailor.
Going to his vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience sake and general reference, now
transferringly measured on it the exact length the coffin was to be, and then made the transfer
permanent by cutting two notches at its extremities. This done, he marshalled the planks and his
tools, and to work.
When the last nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted, he lightly shouldered the coffin
and went forward with it, inquiring whether they were ready for it yet in that direction.
Overhearing the indignant but half-humorous cries with which the people on deck began to drive
the coffin away, Queequeg, to every one's consternation, commanded that the thing should be
instantly brought to him, nor was there any denying him; seeing that, of all mortals, some dying men
are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the
poor fellows ought to be indulged.
Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with an attentive eye. He then
called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the
coffin along with one of the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also, biscuits were then
ranged round the sides within: a flask of fresh water was placed at the head, and a small bag of
woody earth scraped up in the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail-cloth being rolled up for a pillow,
Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he might make trial of its comforts, if
any it had. He lay without moving a few minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out his
little god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with Yojo between, he called for the coffin lid
(hatch he called it) to be placed over him. The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there
lay Queequeg in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in view. "Rarmai" (it will do; it is
easy), he murmured at last, and signed to be replaced in his hammock.
But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily hovering near by all this while, drew nigh to him
where he lay, and with soft sobbings, took him by the hand; in the other, holding his tambourine.
"Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this weary roving? where go ye now? But if the
currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where the beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye
do one little errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who's now been missing long: I think he's in those
far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he must be very sad; for look! he's left his
tambourine behind;—I found it. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I'll beat ye your dying
march."
"I have heard," murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, "that in violent fevers, men, all
ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; and that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always
that in their wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken in their
hearing by some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip, in this strange sweetness of his
lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but there?
—Hark! he speaks again: but more wildly now."
"Form two and two! Let's make a General of him! Ho, where's his harpoon? Lay it across here.
—Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a game cock now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg
dies game!—mind ye that; Queequeg dies game!—take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies
game! I say; game, game, game! but base little Pip, he died a coward; died all a'shiver;—out upon
Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles he's a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell
them he jumped from a whale-boat! I'd never beat my tambourine over base Pip, and hail him
General, if he were once more dying here. No, no! shame upon all cowards—shame upon them!
Let 'em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a whale-boat. Shame! shame!"
During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip was led away, and the sick
man was replaced in his hammock.
But now that he had apparently made every preparation for death; now that his coffin was proved
a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon there seemed no need of the carpenter's box: and
thereupon, when some expressed their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that the cause of
his sudden convalescence was this;—at a critical moment, he had just recalled a little duty ashore,
which he was leaving undone; and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not die
yet, he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of his own sovereign will
and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a word, it was Queequeg's conceit, that if a man made up
his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent,
ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.
Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized; that while a sick, civilized
man may be six months convalescing, generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again
in a day. So, in good time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after sitting on the windlass
for a few indolent days (but eating with a vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw
out his arms and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then springing into
the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon, pronounced himself fit for a fight.
With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and emptying into it his canvas
bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all
manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude
way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a
departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his
body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining
truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one
volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against
them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living
parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must
have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away
from surveying poor Queequeg—"Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!"
 CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.
When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South Sea; were it not for
other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long
supplication of my youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand
leagues of blue.
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to
speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the
buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery
prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow
unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms,
reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in
their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of
his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its
arms. The same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted
by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older
than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown
Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world's
whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by
those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.
But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab's brain, as standing like an iron statue at his accustomed
place beside the mizen rigging, with one nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the
Bashee isles (in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other consciously
inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in which the hated White Whale must even
then be swimming. Launched at length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the
Japanese cruising-ground, the old man's purpose intensified itself. His firm lips met like the lips of
a vice; the Delta of his forehead's veins swelled like overladen brooks; in his very sleep, his ringing
cry ran through the vaulted hull, "Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick blood!"
 CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.
Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in these latitudes, and in
preparation for the peculiarly active pursuits shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed,
blistered old blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to the hold again, after concluding his
contributory work for Ahab's leg, but still retained it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the
foremast; being now almost incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and
bowsmen to do some little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their various
weapons and boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an eager circle, all waiting to be
served; holding boat-spades, pike-heads, harpoons, and lances, and jealously watching his every
sooty movement, as he toiled. Nevertheless, this old man's was a patient hammer wielded by a
patient arm. No murmur, no impatience, no petulance did come from him. Silent, slow, and solemn;
bowing over still further his chronically broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the
heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating of his heart. And so it was.—Most miserable!
A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing yawing in his gait, had at an
early period of the voyage excited the curiosity of the mariners. And to the importunity of their
persisted questionings he had finally given in; and so it came to pass that every one now knew the
shameful story of his wretched fate.
Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter's midnight, on the road running between two country
towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge in
a leaning, dilapidated barn. The issue was, the loss of the extremities of both feet. Out of this
revelation, part by part, at last came out the four acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet
uncatastrophied fifth act of the grief of his life's drama.
He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly encountered that thing in
sorrow's technicals called ruin. He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do;
owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe, ruddy
children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove. But one night, under
cover of darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid
into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith
himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family's heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon
the opening of that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his home. Now, for prudent,
most wise, and economic reasons, the blacksmith's shop was in the basement of his dwelling, but
with a separate entrance to it; so that always had the young and loving healthy wife listened with no
unhappy nervousness, but with vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of her young-armed old
husband's hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by passing through the floors and walls, came
up to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery; and so, to stout Labor's iron lullaby, the blacksmith's infants
were rocked to slumber.
Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst thou taken this old
blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon him, then had the young widow had a delicious
grief, and her orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and all of
them a care-killing competency. But Death plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose
whistling daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse than
useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest.
Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more and more
between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with
tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge
choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down into the long church-yard
grass; her children twice followed her thither; and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off
a vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!
Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into
the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense
Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who
still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-
receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and
wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids
sing to them—"Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate
death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself in a life
which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death.
Come hither! put up THY gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry
thee!"
Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall of eve, the blacksmith's
soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went a-whaling.
 CHAPTER 113. The Forge.
With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about mid-day, Perth was
standing between his forge and anvil, the latter placed upon an iron-wood log, with one hand
holding a pike-head in the coals, and with the other at his forge's lungs, when Captain Ahab came
along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag. While yet a little distance from the
forge, moody Ahab paused; till at last, Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it
upon the anvil—the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights, some of which flew
close to Ahab.
"Are these thy Mother Carey's chickens, Perth? they are always flying in thy wake; birds of good
omen, too, but not to all;—look here, they burn; but thou—thou liv'st among them without a scorch."
"Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab," answered Perth, resting for a moment on his
hammer; "I am past scorching; not easily can'st thou scorch a scar."
"Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful to me. In no Paradise
myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith;
say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet
hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?—What wert thou making there?"
"Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in it."
"And can'st thou make it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such hard usage as it had?"
"I think so, sir."
"And I suppose thou can'st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never mind how hard the
metal, blacksmith?"
"Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one."
"Look ye here, then," cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning with both hands on
Perth's shoulders; "look ye here—HERE—can ye smoothe out a seam like this, blacksmith,"
sweeping one hand across his ribbed brow; "if thou could'st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay
my head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes. Answer! Can'st thou
smoothe this seam?"
"Oh! that is the one, sir! Said I not all seams and dents but one?"
"Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable; for though thou only see'st it here in
my flesh, it has worked down into the bone of my skull—THAT is all wrinkles! But, away with child's
play; no more gaffs and pikes to-day. Look ye here!" jingling the leathern bag, as if it were full of
gold coins. "I, too, want a harpoon made; one that a thousand yoke of fiends could not part, Perth;
something that will stick in a whale like his own fin-bone. There's the stuff," flinging the pouch upon
the anvil. "Look ye, blacksmith, these are the gathered nail-stubbs of the steel shoes of racing
horses."
"Horse-shoe stubbs, sir? Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here, then, the best and stubbornest stuff
we blacksmiths ever work."
"I know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together like glue from the melted bones of murderers.
Quick! forge me the harpoon. And forge me first, twelve rods for its shank; then wind, and twist, and
hammer these twelve together like the yarns and strands of a tow-line. Quick! I'll blow the fire."
When at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by spiralling them, with
his own hand, round a long, heavy iron bolt. "A flaw!" rejecting the last one. "Work that over again,
Perth."
 This done, Perth was about to begin welding the twelve into one, when Ahab stayed his hand,
and said he would weld his own iron. As, then, with regular, gasping hems, he hammered on the
anvil, Perth passing to him the glowing rods, one after the other, and the hard pressed forge
shooting up its intense straight flame, the Parsee passed silently, and bowing over his head
towards the fire, seemed invoking some curse or some blessing on the toil. But, as Ahab looked
up, he slid aside.
"What's that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for?" muttered Stubb, looking on from the
forecastle. "That Parsee smells fire like a fusee; and smells of it himself, like a hot musket's
powder-pan."
At last the shank, in one complete rod, received its final heat; and as Perth, to temper it, plunged
it all hissing into the cask of water near by, the scalding steam shot up into Ahab's bent face.
"Would'st thou brand me, Perth?" wincing for a moment with the pain; "have I been but forging
my own branding-iron, then?"
"Pray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this harpoon for the White Whale?
"
"For the white fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must make them thyself, man. Here are my
razors—the best of steel; here, and make the barbs sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea."
For a moment, the old blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would fain not use them.
"Take them, man, I have no need for them; for I now neither shave, sup, nor pray till—but here—to
work!"
Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the shank, the steel soon
pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior
to tempering them, he cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near.
"No, no—no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg,
Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me as much blood as will cover this barb?" holding it
high up. A cluster of dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and
the White Whale's barbs were then tempered.
"Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!" deliriously howled Ahab, as the
malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood.
Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one of hickory, with the bark still
investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the socket of the iron. A coil of new tow-line was then unwound,
and some fathoms of it taken to the windlass, and stretched to a great tension. Pressing his foot
upon it, till the rope hummed like a harp-string, then eagerly bending over it, and seeing no
strandings, Ahab exclaimed, "Good! and now for the seizings."
At one extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns were all braided and
woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole was then driven hard up into the socket; from the
lower end the rope was traced half-way along the pole's length, and firmly secured so, with
intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope—like the Three Fates—remained
inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with the weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, and the
sound of the hickory pole, both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered his cabin,
light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous sound was heard. Oh, Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy
idle but unresting eye; all thy strange mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy
of the melancholy ship, and mocked it!
 CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.
Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising ground, the Pequod was
soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild, pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty
hours on the stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or sailing, or paddling after
the whales, or for an interlude of sixty or seventy minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though with
but small success for their pains.
At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in
his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like
hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when
beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that
pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless
fang.
These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a certain filial, confident, land-
like feeling towards the sea; that he regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship
revealing only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high rolling waves, but
through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when the western emigrants' horses only show their
erected ears, while their hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.
The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there steals the hush, the hum;
you almost swear that play-wearied children lie sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time,
when the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that
fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole.
Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as temporary an effect on
Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem to open in him his own secret golden treasuries,
yet did his breath upon them prove but tarnishing.
Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,—though long parched
by the dead drought of the earthy life,—in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning
clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to
God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp
and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing
progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:
—through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the
common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of
If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs
eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the
world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls
are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity
lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side into that same golden sea,
Starbuck lowly murmured:—
"Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride's eye!—Tell me not of thy teeth-
tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look
deep down and do believe."
And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same golden light:—
"I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been
jolly!"
 CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down before the wind, some
few weeks after Ahab's harpoon had been welded.
It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her last cask of oil, and bolted
down her bursting hatches; and now, in glad holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat vain-
gloriously, sailing round among the widely-separated ships on the ground, previous to pointing her
prow for home.
The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red bunting at their hats; from
the stern, a whale-boat was suspended, bottom down; and hanging captive from the bowsprit was
seen the long lower jaw of the last whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colours
were flying from her rigging, on every side. Sideways lashed in each of her three basketed tops
were two barrels of sperm; above which, in her top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender breakers of
the same precious fluid; and nailed to her main truck was a brazen lamp.
As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most surprising success; all the more
wonderful, for that while cruising in the same seas numerous other vessels had gone entire months
without securing a single fish. Not only had barrels of beef and bread been given away to make
room for the far more valuable sperm, but additional supplemental casks had been bartered for,
from the ships she had met; and these were stowed along the deck, and in the captain's and
officers' state-rooms. Even the cabin table itself had been knocked into kindling-wood; and the
cabin mess dined off the broad head of an oil-butt, lashed down to the floor for a centrepiece. In
the forecastle, the sailors had actually caulked and pitched their chests, and filled them; it was
humorously added, that the cook had clapped a head on his largest boiler, and filled it; that the
steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled it; that the harpooneers had headed the
sockets of their irons and filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the
captain's pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into, in self-complacent
testimony of his entire satisfaction.
As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the barbarian sound of
enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen
standing round her huge try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like POKE or stomach skin of
the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the clenched hands of the crew. On the
quarter-deck, the mates and harpooneers were dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped
with them from the Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly secured aloft
between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with glittering fiddle-bows of
whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship's company were
tumultuously busy at the masonry of the try-works, from which the huge pots had been removed.
You would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed Bastille, such wild cries they
raised, as the now useless brick and mortar were being hurled into the sea.
Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the ship's elevated quarter-deck,
so that the whole rejoicing drama was full before him, and seemed merely contrived for his own
individual diversion.
And Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black, with a stubborn gloom;
and as the two ships crossed each other's wakes—one all jubilations for things passed, the other
all forebodings as to things to come—their two captains in themselves impersonated the whole
striking contrast of the scene.
"Come aboard, come aboard!" cried the gay Bachelor's commander, lifting a glass and a bottle
in the air.
"Hast seen the White Whale?" gritted Ahab in reply.
 "No; only heard of him; but don't believe in him at all," said the other good-humoredly. "Come
aboard!"
"Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?"
"Not enough to speak of—two islanders, that's all;—but come aboard, old hearty, come along. I'll
soon take that black from your brow. Come along, will ye (merry's the play); a full ship and
homeward-bound."
"How wondrous familiar is a fool!" muttered Ahab; then aloud, "Thou art a full ship and
homeward bound, thou sayst; well, then, call me an empty ship, and outward-bound. So go thy
ways, and I will mine. Forward there! Set all sail, and keep her to the wind!"
And thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other stubbornly fought against
it; and so the two vessels parted; the crew of the Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances
towards the receding Bachelor; but the Bachelor's men never heeding their gaze for the lively
revelry they were in. And as Ahab, leaning over the taffrail, eyed the homewardbound craft, he took
from his pocket a small vial of sand, and then looking from the ship to the vial, seemed thereby
bringing two remote associations together, for that vial was filled with Nantucket soundings.
 CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.
Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune's favourites sail close by us, we, though all
adroop before, catch somewhat of the rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out. So
seemed it with the Pequod. For next day after encountering the gay Bachelor, whales were seen
and four were slain; and one of them by Ahab.
It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson fight were done: and
floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun and whale both stilly died together; then, such a
sweetness and such plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that it almost
seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-
breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns.
Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned off from the whale,
sat intently watching his final wanings from the now tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle
observable in all sperm whales dying—the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring—that
strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a wondrousness
unknown before.
"He turns and turns him to it,—how slowly, but how steadfastly, his homage-rendering and
invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial
vassal of the sun!—Oh that these too-favouring eyes should see these too-favouring sights. Look!
here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe; in these most candid and impartial
seas; where to traditions no rocks furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have
still rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the Niger's unknown source;
here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the
corpse, and it heads some other way.
"Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded thy separate throne
somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly
speakest to me in the wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor has
this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round again, without a lesson to me.
"Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet!—that one
strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-
quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me
with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed
by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now.
"Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl finds his only rest. Born of
earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-
brothers!"
 CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.
The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to windward; one, less distant,
to leeward; one ahead; one astern. These last three were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the
windward one could not be reached till morning; and the boat that had killed it lay by its side all
night; and that boat was Ahab's.
The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale's spout-hole; and the lantern hanging from
its top, cast a troubled flickering glare upon the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight
waves, which gently chafed the whale's broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach.
Ahab and all his boat's crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who crouching in the bow, sat
watching the sharks, that spectrally played round the whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with
their tails. A sound like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of
Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air.
Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and hooped round by the gloom
of the night they seemed the last men in a flooded world. "I have dreamed it again," said he.
"Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor coffin can be thine?"
"And who are hearsed that die on the sea?"
"But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two hearses must verily be seen by
thee on the sea; the first not made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be
grown in America."
"Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:—a hearse and its plumes floating over the ocean with
the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! Such a sight we shall not soon see."
"Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man."
"And what was that saying about thyself?"
"Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot."
"And when thou art so gone before—if that ever befall—then ere I can follow, thou must still
appear to me, to pilot me still?—Was it not so? Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I
have here two pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it."
"Take another pledge, old man," said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up like fire-flies in the
gloom—"Hemp only can kill thee."
"The gallows, ye mean.—I am immortal then, on land and on sea," cried Ahab, with a laugh of
derision;—"Immortal on land and on sea!"
Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and the slumbering crew arose
from the boat's bottom, and ere noon the dead whale was brought to the ship.
 CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.
The season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab, coming from his cabin,
cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager
mariners quickly run to the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes centrally fixed on the
nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to point the ship's prow for the equator. In good time the
order came. It was hard upon high noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat,
was about taking his wonted daily observation of the sun to determine his latitude.
Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences. That unblinkingly
vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean's immeasurable burning-glass.
The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of
unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God's throne. Well that Ahab's quadrant
was furnished with coloured glasses, through which to take sight of that solar fire. So, swinging his
seated form to the roll of the ship, and with his astrological-looking instrument placed to his eye, he
remained in that posture for some moments to catch the precise instant when the sun should gain
its precise meridian. Meantime while his whole attention was absorbed, the Parsee was kneeling
beneath him on the ship's deck, and with face thrown up like Ahab's, was eyeing the same sun with
him; only the lids of his eyes half hooded their orbs, and his wild face was subdued to an earthly
passionlessness. At length the desired observation was taken; and with his pencil upon his ivory
leg, Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must be at that precise instant. Then falling into a
moment's revery, he again looked up towards the sun and murmured to himself: "Thou sea-mark!
thou high and mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly where I AM—but canst thou cast the least hint where
I SHALL be? Or canst thou tell where some other thing besides me is this moment living? Where is
Moby Dick? This instant thou must be eyeing him. These eyes of mine look into the very eye that is
even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye that is even now equally beholding the objects on
the unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun!"
Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its numerous cabalistical
contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered: "Foolish toy! babies' plaything of haughty
Admirals, and Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but
what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this
wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop
of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the
sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to
that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with
thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the glances of man's eyes; not shot from
the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou
quadrant!" dashing it to the deck, "no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship's
compass, and the level deadreckoning, by log and by line; THESE shall conduct me, and show me
my place on the sea. Aye," lighting from the boat to the deck, "thus I trample on thee, thou paltry
thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!"
As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live and dead feet, a sneering
triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself
—these passed over the mute, motionless Parsee's face. Unobserved he rose and glided away;
while, awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered together on the
forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck, shouted out—"To the braces! Up helm!—square
in!"
In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled upon her heel, her three firm-
seated graceful masts erectly poised upon her long, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii
pirouetting on one sufficient steed.
Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod's tumultuous way, and
Ahab's also, as he went lurching along the deck.
 "I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of its tormented flaming life;
and I have seen it wane at last, down, down, to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery
life of thine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!"
"Aye," cried Stubb, "but sea-coal ashes—mind ye that, Mr. Starbuck—sea-coal, not your
common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab mutter, 'Here some one thrusts these cards into these
old hands of mine; swears that I must play them, and no others.' And damn me, Ahab, but thou
actest right; live in the game, and die in it!"
 CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of
ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba
knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these resplendent
Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst
from out that cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.
Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and bare-poled was left to fight
a Typhoon which had struck her directly ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and
split with the thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled masts fluttering here
and there with the rags which the first fury of the tempest had left for its after sport.
Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every flash of the lightning
glancing aloft, to see what additional disaster might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while
Stubb and Flask were directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the boats. But
all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted to the very top of the cranes, the windward quarter
boat (Ahab's) did not escape. A great rolling sea, dashing high up against the reeling ship's high
teetering side, stove in the boat's bottom at the stern, and left it again, all dripping through like a
sieve.
"Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck," said Stubb, regarding the wreck, "but the sea will have its
way. Stubb, for one, can't fight it. You see, Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before
it leaps, all round the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me, all the start I have to
meet it, is just across the deck here. But never mind; it's all in fun: so the old song says;"
—(SINGS.)

Oh! jolly is the gale,

And a joker is the whale,
A' flourishin' his tail,—
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!

The scud all a flyin',

That's his flip only foamin';
When he stirs in the spicin',—
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!

Thunder splits the ships,

But he only smacks his lips,
A tastin' of this flip,—
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!

"Avast Stubb," cried Starbuck, "let the Typhoon sing, and strike his harp here in our rigging; but
if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy peace."
"But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward; and I sing to keep up
my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr. Starbuck, there's no way to stop my singing in this world but
to cut my throat. And when that's done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a wind-up."
"Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own."
"What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else, never mind how foolish?"
"Here!" cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his hand towards the
weather bow, "markest thou not that the gale comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab is to
run for Moby Dick? the very course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat there; where is
that stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to stand—his stand-point is stove, man! Now
jump overboard, and sing away, if thou must!
"I don't half understand ye: what's in the wind?"
 "Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nantucket," soliloquized
Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's question. "The gale that now hammers at us to stave us,
we can turn it into a fair wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward, all is blackness
of doom; but to leeward, homeward—I see it lightens up there; but not with the lightning."
At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following the flashes, a voice was
heard at his side; and almost at the same instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.
"Who's there?"
"Old Thunder!" said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his pivot-hole; but suddenly
finding his path made plain to him by elbowed lances of fire.
Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off the perilous fluid into the soil;
so the kindred rod which at sea some ships carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the
water. But as this conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may avoid all contact
with the hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly towing there, it would be liable to many mishaps,
besides interfering not a little with some of the rigging, and more or less impeding the vessel's way
in the water; because of all this, the lower parts of a ship's lightning-rods are not always overboard;
but are generally made in long slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the chains
outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require.
"The rods! the rods!" cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished to vigilance by the vivid
lightning that had just been darting flambeaux, to light Ahab to his post. "Are they overboard? drop
them over, fore and aft. Quick!"
"Avast!" cried Ahab; "let's have fair play here, though we be the weaker side. Yet I'll contribute to
raise rods on the Himmalehs and Andes, that all the world may be secured; but out on privileges!
Let them be, sir."
"Look aloft!" cried Starbuck. "The corpusants! the corpusants!"
All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end
with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous
air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.
"Blast the boat! let it go!" cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing sea heaved up under his
own little craft, so that its gunwale violently jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. "Blast
it!"—but slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and immediately
shifting his tone he cried—"The corpusants have mercy on us all!"
To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of the calm, and in the teeth
of the tempest; they will imprecate curses from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over
to a seething sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when God's
burning finger has been laid on the ship; when His "Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin" has been woven
into the shrouds and the cordage.
While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the enchanted crew; who in
one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like
a far away constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the gigantic jet negro, Daggoo,
loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed the black cloud from which the thunder had come.
The parted mouth of Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely gleamed as if they
too had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by the preternatural light, Queequeg's tattooing
burned like Satanic blue flames on his body.
The tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once more the Pequod and every soul
on her decks were wrapped in a pall. A moment or two passed, when Starbuck, going forward,
pushed against some one. It was Stubb. "What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not
the same in the song."
"No, no, it wasn't; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I hope they will, still. But do they
only have mercy on long faces?—have they no bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck—but
it's too dark to look. Hear me, then: I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign of good luck; for
those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be chock a' block with sperm-oil, d'ye see; and
so, all that sperm will work up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will yet be as
three spermaceti candles—that's the good promise we saw."
At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb's face slowly beginning to glimmer into sight.
Glancing upwards, he cried: "See! see!" and once more the high tapering flames were beheld with
what seemed redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor.
"The corpusants have mercy on us all," cried Stubb, again.
At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame, the Parsee was kneeling
in Ahab's front, but with his head bowed away from him; while near by, from the arched and
overhanging rigging, where they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen,
arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung pendulous, like a knot of numbed wasps
from a drooping, orchard twig. In various enchanted attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or
running skeletons in Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck; but all their eyes upcast.
"Aye, aye, men!" cried Ahab. "Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the
White Whale! Hand me those mainmast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat
against it; blood against fire! So."
Then turning—the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot upon the Parsee; and with
fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of
flames.
"Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the
sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear
spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be
kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own
thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its
unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality
stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly
live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe.
Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere
supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that
still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire,
I breathe it back to thee."
[SUDDEN, REPEATED FLASHES OF LIGHTNING; THE NINE FLAMES LEAP LENGTHWISE
TO THRICE THEIR PREVIOUS HEIGHT; AHAB, WITH THE REST, CLOSES HIS EYES, HIS
RIGHT HAND PRESSED HARD UPON THEM.]
"I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now
drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be
ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning
flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as
beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light
though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of
thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous!
now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh,
cruel! what hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not
how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest
thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is
some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy
creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh,
thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy
unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky!
I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!"
"The boat! the boat!" cried Starbuck, "look at thy boat, old man!"
Ahab's harpoon, the one forged at Perth's fire, remained firmly lashed in its conspicuous crotch,
so that it projected beyond his whale-boat's bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused
the loose leather sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a levelled flame
of pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned there like a serpent's tongue, Starbuck grasped
Ahab by the arm—"God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! 'tis an ill voyage! ill begun, ill
continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards,
to go on a better voyage than this."
Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the braces—though not a sail was
left aloft. For the moment all the aghast mate's thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous
cry. But dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab
waved it like a torch among them; swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a
rope's end. Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart that he held, the men
fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:—
"All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart, soul, and body, lungs
and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I
blow out the last fear!" And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the flame.
As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of some lone, gigantic elm,
whose very height and strength but render it so much the more unsafe, because so much the more
a mark for thunderbolts; so at those last words of Ahab's many of the mariners did run from him in
a terror of dismay.
 CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First
Night Watch.
AHAB STANDING BY THE HELM. STARBUCK APPROACHING HIM.
"We must send down the main-top-sail yard, sir. The band is working loose and the lee lift is half-
stranded. Shall I strike it, sir?"
"Strike nothing; lash it. If I had sky-sail poles, I'd sway them up now."
"Sir!—in God's name!—sir?"
"Well."
"The anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard?"
"Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind rises, but it has not got up to my
table-lands yet. Quick, and see to it.—By masts and keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed
skipper of some coasting smack. Send down my main-top-sail yard! Ho, gluepots! Loftiest trucks
were made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of mine now sails amid the cloud-scud. Shall I
strike that? Oh, none but cowards send down their brain-trucks in tempest time. What a hooroosh
aloft there! I would e'en take it for sublime, did I not know that the colic is a noisy malady. Oh, take
medicine, take medicine!"
 CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle Bulwarks.
STUBB AND FLASK MOUNTED ON THEM, AND PASSING ADDITIONAL LASHINGS OVER
THE ANCHORS THERE HANGING.
"No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but you will never pound into
me what you were just now saying. And how long ago is it since you said the very contrary? Didn't
you once say that whatever ship Ahab sails in, that ship should pay something extra on its
insurance policy, just as though it were loaded with powder barrels aft and boxes of lucifers
forward? Stop, now; didn't you say so?"
"Well, suppose I did? What then? I've part changed my flesh since that time, why not my mind?
Besides, supposing we ARE loaded with powder barrels aft and lucifers forward; how the devil
could the lucifers get afire in this drenching spray here? Why, my little man, you have pretty red hair,
but you couldn't get afire now. Shake yourself; you're Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill
pitchers at your coat collar. Don't you see, then, that for these extra risks the Marine Insurance
companies have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants, Flask. But hark, again, and I'll answer ye
the other thing. First take your leg off from the crown of the anchor here, though, so I can pass the
rope; now listen. What's the mighty difference between holding a mast's lightning-rod in the storm,
and standing close by a mast that hasn't got any lightning-rod at all in a storm? Don't you see, you
timber-head, that no harm can come to the holder of the rod, unless the mast is first struck? What
are you talking about, then? Not one ship in a hundred carries rods, and Ahab,—aye, man, and all
of us,—were in no more danger then, in my poor opinion, than all the crews in ten thousand ships
now sailing the seas. Why, you King-Post, you, I suppose you would have every man in the world
go about with a small lightning-rod running up the corner of his hat, like a militia officer's skewered
feather, and trailing behind like his sash. Why don't ye be sensible, Flask? it's easy to be sensible;
why don't ye, then? any man with half an eye can be sensible."
"I don't know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard."
"Yes, when a fellow's soaked through, it's hard to be sensible, that's a fact. And I am about
drenched with this spray. Never mind; catch the turn there, and pass it. Seems to me we are
lashing down these anchors now as if they were never going to be used again. Tying these two
anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man's hands behind him. And what big generous hands
they are, to be sure. These are your iron fists, hey? What a hold they have, too! I wonder, Flask,
whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable,
though. There, hammer that knot down, and we've done. So; next to touching land, lighting on deck
is the most satisfactory. I say, just wring out my jacket skirts, will ye? Thank ye. They laugh at long-
togs so, Flask; but seems to me, a Long tailed coat ought always to be worn in all storms afloat.
The tails tapering down that way, serve to carry off the water, d'ye see. Same with cocked hats; the
cocks form gable-end eave-troughs, Flask. No more monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I must
mount a swallow-tail, and drive down a beaver; so. Halloa! whew! there goes my tarpaulin
overboard; Lord, Lord, that the winds that come from heaven should be so unmannerly! This is a
nasty night, lad."
 CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning.
THE MAIN-TOP-SAIL YARD.—TASHTEGO PASSING NEW LASHINGS AROUND IT.
"Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What's the use of thunder?
Um, um, um. We don't want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!"
 CHAPTER 123. The Musket.
During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod's jaw-bone tiller had
several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by its spasmodic motions, even though preventer
tackles had been attached to it—for they were slack—because some play to the tiller was
indispensable.
In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to the blast, it is by no means
uncommon to see the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with
the Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice the whirling velocity with
which they revolved upon the cards; it is a sight that hardly anyone can behold without some sort of
unwonted emotion.
Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the strenuous exertions of
Starbuck and Stubb—one engaged forward and the other aft—the shivered remnants of the jib
and fore and main-top-sails were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like
the feathers of an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when that storm-tossed bird is
on the wing.
The three corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed, and a storm-trysail was set further
aft; so that the ship soon went through the water with some precision again; and the course—for
the present, East-south-east—which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more given to the
helmsman. For during the violence of the gale, he had only steered according to its vicissitudes.
But as he was now bringing the ship as near her course as possible, watching the compass
meanwhile, lo! a good sign! the wind seemed coming round astern; aye, the foul breeze became
fair!
Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of "HO! THE FAIR WIND! OH-YE-HO,
CHEERLY MEN!" the crew singing for joy, that so promising an event should so soon have falsified
the evil portents preceding it.
In compliance with the standing order of his commander—to report immediately, and at any one
of the twenty-four hours, any decided change in the affairs of the deck,—Starbuck had no sooner
trimmed the yards to the breeze—however reluctantly and gloomily,—than he mechanically went
below to apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance.
Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it a moment. The cabin lamp
—taking long swings this way and that—was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old
man's bolted door,—a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels. The isolated
subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there, though it was
hooped round by all the roar of the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly
revealed, as they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest, upright
man; but out of Starbuck's heart, at that instant when he saw the muskets, there strangely evolved
an evil thought; but so blent with its neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly
knew it for itself.
"He would have shot me once," he murmured, "yes, there's the very musket that he pointed at
me;—that one with the studded stock; let me touch it—lift it. Strange, that I, who have handled so
many deadly lances, strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, aye; and
powder in the pan;—that's not good. Best spill it?—wait. I'll cure myself of this. I'll hold the musket
boldly while I think.—I come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death and doom,
—THAT'S fair for Moby Dick. It's a fair wind that's only fair for that accursed fish.—The very tube he
pointed at me!—the very one; THIS one—I hold it here; he would have killed me with the very thing I
handle now.—Aye and he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say he will not strike his spars to
any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these same perilous seas, gropes he
not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he
not swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to
drag a whole ship's company down to doom with him?—Yes, it would make him the wilful murderer
of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul
swears this ship will, if Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this instant—put aside, that crime would
not be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes, just there,—in there, he's sleeping. Sleeping?
aye, but still alive, and soon awake again. I can't withstand thee, then, old man. Not reasoning; not
remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat
commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye, and say'st the men have vow'd thy vow; say'st all of us
are Ahabs. Great God forbid!—But is there no other way? no lawful way?—Make him a prisoner to
be taken home? What! hope to wrest this old man's living power from his own living hands? Only a
fool would try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes and hawsers; chained
down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would be more hideous than a caged tiger, then. I could
not endure the sight; could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason
would leave me on the long intolerable voyage. What, then, remains? The land is hundreds of
leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest. I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two
oceans and a whole continent between me and law.—Aye, aye, 'tis so.—Is heaven a murderer
when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin together?
—And would I be a murderer, then, if"—and slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed
the loaded musket's end against the door.
"On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within; his head this way. A touch, and Starbuck may
survive to hug his wife and child again.—Oh Mary! Mary!—boy! boy! boy!—But if I wake thee not to
death, old man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day week may sink,
with all the crew! Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? shall I?—The wind has gone down and
shifted, sir; the fore and main topsails are reefed and set; she heads her course."
"Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!"
Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man's tormented sleep, as if
Starbuck's voice had caused the long dumb dream to speak.
The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel; Starbuck seemed
wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the
place.
"He's too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell him. I must see to the
deck here. Thou know'st what to say."
 CHAPTER 124. The Needle.
Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk, and striving in
the Pequod's gurgling track, pushed her on like giants' palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering
breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed
before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread
intensity of his place; where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned
Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold,
that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.
Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time the tetering ship
loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye the bright sun's rays produced ahead; and
when she profoundly settled by the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun's rearward place, and
how the same yellow rays were blending with his undeviating wake.
"Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of the sun. Ho, ho! all ye
nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye! Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the
sea!"
But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards the helm, huskily
demanding how the ship was heading.
"East-sou-east, sir," said the frightened steersman.
"Thou liest!" smiting him with his clenched fist. "Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the
sun astern?"
Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then observed by Ahab had
unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very blinding palpableness must have been the
cause.
Thrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of the compasses; his
uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck
looked, and lo! the two compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.
But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the old man with a rigid laugh
exclaimed, "I have it! It has happened before. Mr. Starbuck, last night's thunder turned our
compasses—that's all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it."
"Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir," said the pale mate, gloomily.
Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than one case occurred to
ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know,
essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled at, that
such things should be. Instances where the lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite
down some of the spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more fatal;
all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetic steel was of no more use than
an old wife's knitting needle. But in either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the
original virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same fate
reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost one inserted into the
kelson.
Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed compasses, the old man,
with the sharp of his extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the
needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship's course to be changed
accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into
the opposing wind, for the supposed fair one had only been juggling her.
 Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing, but quietly he issued
all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask—who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing
his feelings—likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some of them lowly
rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate. But as ever before, the pagan
harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain
magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's.
For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But chancing to slip with his ivory
heel, he saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the
deck.
"Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot! yesterday I wrecked thee, and to-day the
compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr.
Starbuck—a lance without a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker's needles.
Quick!"
Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about to do, were certain
prudential motives, whose object might have been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of
his subtile skill, in a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old man
well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be
passed over by superstitious sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents.
"Men," said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had
demanded, "my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can
make one of his own, that will point as true as any."
Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was said; and with
fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might follow. But Starbuck looked away.
With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the lance, and then handing to
the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then,
with the maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the blunted needle
endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that, several times, the mate still holding the
rod as before. Then going through some small strange motions with it—whether indispensable to
the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain—he
called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there, and
horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass-cards. At first, the
steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its place,
when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle,
and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,—"Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not
lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!"
One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could persuade such ignorance
as theirs, and one after another they slunk away.
In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.
 CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.
While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log and line had but very
seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of determining the vessel's
place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave
the log; though at the same time, and frequently more for form's sake than anything else, regularly
putting down upon the customary slate the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed
average rate of progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden reel and
angular log attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the railing of the after bulwarks. Rains and
spray had damped it; sun and wind had warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that
hung so idly. But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened to glance upon the
reel, not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered how his quadrant was no more,
and recalled his frantic oath about the level log and line. The ship was sailing plungingly; astern the
billows rolled in riots.
"Forward, there! Heave the log!"
Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. "Take the reel, one of
ye, I'll heave."
They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship's lee side, where the deck, with the oblique
energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.
The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting handle-ends of the spindle,
round which the spool of line revolved, so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab
advanced to him.
Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty turns to form a preliminary
hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line,
made bold to speak.
"Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have spoiled it."
"'Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee? Thou seem'st to hold. Or,
truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it."
"I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these grey hairs of mine 'tis not worth
while disputing, 'specially with a superior, who'll ne'er confess."
"What's that? There now's a patched professor in Queen Nature's granite-founded College; but
methinks he's too subservient. Where wert thou born?"
"In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir."
"Excellent! Thou'st hit the world by that."
"I know not, sir, but I was born there."
"In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it's good. Here's a man from Man; a man born in
once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man; which is sucked in—by what? Up with the
reel! The dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So."
The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long dragging line astern, and
then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the
towing resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.
"Hold hard!"
Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging log was gone.
 "I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts the log-line. But
Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian; reel up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make
another log, and mend thou the line. See to it."
"There he goes now; to him nothing's happened; but to me, the skewer seems loosening out of
the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in, Tahitian! These lines run whole, and whirling out: come in
broken, and dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?"
"Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip's missing. Let's see now if ye
haven't fished him up here, fisherman. It drags hard; I guess he's holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk
him off; we haul in no cowards here. Ho! there's his arm just breaking water. A hatchet! a hatchet!
cut it off—we haul in no cowards here. Captain Ahab! sir, sir! here's Pip, trying to get on board
again."
"Peace, thou crazy loon," cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm. "Away from the quarter-
deck!"
"The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser," muttered Ahab, advancing. "Hands off from that
holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?
"Astern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!"
"And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes. Oh God! that man
should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through! Who art thou, boy?"
"Bell-boy, sir; ship's-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred pounds of clay reward
for Pip; five feet high—looks cowardly—quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip
the coward?"
"There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here. Ye did
beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab's cabin
shall be Pip's home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied
to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let's down."
"What's this? here's velvet shark-skin," intently gazing at Ahab's hand, and feeling it. "Ah, now,
had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne'er been lost! This seems to me, sir,
as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and rivet
these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this go."
"Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors than are here. Come,
then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the
omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he
does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy
black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor's!"
"There go two daft ones now," muttered the old Manxman. "One daft with strength, the other daft
with weakness. But here's the end of the rotten line—all dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had
best have a new line altogether. I'll see Mr. Stubb about it."
 CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.
Steering now south-eastward by Ahab's levelled steel, and her progress solely determined by
Ahab's level log and line; the Pequod held on her path towards the Equator. Making so long a
passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled
by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed the strange calm things
preluding some riotous and desperate scene.
At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the Equatorial fishing-ground, and
in the deep darkness that goes before the dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch
—then headed by Flask—was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly—like half-
articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod's murdered Innocents—that one and all, they started
from their reveries, and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly
listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing. The Christian or
civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers
remained unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman—the oldest mariner of all—declared that the wild
thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned men in the sea.
Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when he came to the deck; it was
then recounted to him by Flask, not unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly
laughed, and thus explained the wonder.
Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great numbers of seals, and some
young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh
the ship and kept company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this only
the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about
seals, arising not only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the human look of
their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside. In
the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men.
But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible confirmation in the fate of
one of their number that morning. At sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at
the fore; and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for sailors sometimes
go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that
as it may, he had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard—a cry and a rushing—and
looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a little tossed heap of white
bubbles in the blue of the sea.
The life-buoy—a long slender cask—was dropped from the stern, where it always hung obedient
to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had
shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and that parched wood also filled at its every pore; and the
studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though in
sooth but a hard one.
And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the White Whale, on
the White Whale's own peculiar ground; that man was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps,
thought of that at the time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this event, at least as a
portent; for they regarded it, not as a foreshadowing of evil in the future, but as the fulfilment of an
evil already presaged. They declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks they had
heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said nay.
The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see to it; but as no cask of
sufficient lightness could be found, and as in the feverish eagerness of what seemed the
approaching crisis of the voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly
connected with its final end, whatever that might prove to be; therefore, they were going to leave
the ship's stern unprovided with a buoy, when by certain strange signs and inuendoes Queequeg
hinted a hint concerning his coffin.
 "A life-buoy of a coffin!" cried Starbuck, starting.
"Rather queer, that, I should say," said Stubb.
"It will make a good enough one," said Flask, "the carpenter here can arrange it easily."
"Bring it up; there's nothing else for it," said Starbuck, after a melancholy pause. "Rig it,
carpenter; do not look at me so—the coffin, I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it."
"And shall I nail down the lid, sir?" moving his hand as with a hammer.
"Aye."
"And shall I caulk the seams, sir?" moving his hand as with a caulking-iron.
"Aye."
"And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?" moving his hand as with a pitch-pot.
"Away! what possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and no more.—Mr. Stubb,
Mr. Flask, come forward with me."
"He goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks. Now I don't like this. I
make a leg for Captain Ahab, and he wears it like a gentleman; but I make a bandbox for
Queequeg, and he won't put his head into it. Are all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin? And
now I'm ordered to make a life-buoy of it. It's like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on the
other side now. I don't like this cobbling sort of business—I don't like it at all; it's undignified; it's not
my place. Let tinkers' brats do tinkerings; we are their betters. I like to take in hand none but clean,
virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins at the beginning, and is
at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at the conclusion; not a cobbler's job, that's at an
end in the middle, and at the beginning at the end. It's the old woman's tricks to be giving cobbling
jobs. Lord! what an affection all old women have for tinkers. I know an old woman of sixty-five who
ran away with a bald-headed young tinker once. And that's the reason I never would work for lonely
widow old women ashore, when I kept my job-shop in the Vineyard; they might have taken it into
their lonely old heads to run off with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea but snow-caps. Let
me see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay over the same with pitch; batten them down tight,
and hang it with the snap-spring over the ship's stern. Were ever such things done before with a
coffin? Some superstitious old carpenters, now, would be tied up in the rigging, ere they would do
the job. But I'm made of knotty Aroostook hemlock; I don't budge. Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing
about with a grave-yard tray! But never mind. We workers in woods make bridal-bedsteads and
card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses. We work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit;
not for us to ask the why and wherefore of our work, unless it be too confounded cobbling, and then
we stash it if we can. Hem! I'll do the job, now, tenderly. I'll have me—let's see—how many in the
ship's company, all told? But I've forgotten. Any way, I'll have me thirty separate, Turk's-headed life-
lines, each three feet long hanging all round to the coffin. Then, if the hull go down, there'll be thirty
lively fellows all fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun! Come hammer,
caulking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let's to it."
 CHAPTER 127. The Deck.
THE COFFIN LAID UPON TWO LINE-TUBS, BETWEEN THE VICE-BENCH AND THE OPEN
HATCHWAY; THE CARPENTER CAULKING ITS SEAMS; THE STRING OF TWISTED OAKUM
SLOWLY UNWINDING FROM A LARGE ROLL OF IT PLACED IN THE BOSOM OF HIS FROCK.
—AHAB COMES SLOWLY FROM THE CABIN-GANGWAY, AND HEARS PIP FOLLOWING HIM.
"Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand complies with my humor
more genially than that boy.—Middle aisle of a church! What's here?"
"Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck's orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the hatchway!"
"Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault."
"Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does."
"Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy shop?"
"I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?"
"Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?"
"Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but they've set me now to turning
it into something else."
"Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling, monopolising, heathenish old
scamp, to be one day making legs, and the next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-
buoys out of those same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a jack-of-
all-trades."
"But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do."
"The gods again. Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a coffin? The Titans, they say,
hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play
sings, spade in hand. Dost thou never?"
"Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I'm indifferent enough, sir, for that; but the reason why the grave-digger
made music must have been because there was none in his spade, sir. But the caulking mallet is
full of it. Hark to it."
"Aye, and that's because the lid there's a sounding-board; and what in all things makes the
sounding-board is this—there's naught beneath. And yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much
the same, Carpenter. Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin knock against the
churchyard gate, going in?
"Faith, sir, I've—"
"Faith? What's that?"
"Why, faith, sir, it's only a sort of exclamation-like—that's all, sir."
"Um, um; go on."
"I was about to say, sir, that—"
"Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself? Look at thy bosom!
Despatch! and get these traps out of sight."
"He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot latitudes. I've heard that the
Isle of Albemarle, one of the Gallipagos, is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems to me
some sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his middle. He's always under the Line—fiery
hot, I tell ye! He's looking this way—come, oakum; quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is
the cork, and I'm the professor of musical glasses—tap, tap!"
(AHAB TO HIMSELF.)
"There's a sight! There's a sound! The grey-headed woodpecker tapping the hollow tree! Blind
and dumb might well be envied now. See! that thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most
malicious wag, that fellow. Rat-tat! So man's seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all materials!
What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now's the very dreaded symbol of
grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered
life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is,
after all, but an immortality-preserver! I'll think of that. But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of
earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me. Will ye never
have done, Carpenter, with that accursed sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here when I
return again. Now, then, Pip, we'll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee!
Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee!"
 CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
Next day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down upon the Pequod, all her
spars thickly clustering with men. At the time the Pequod was making good speed through the
water; but as the broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all fell
together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled from the smitten hull.
"Bad news; she brings bad news," muttered the old Manxman. But ere her commander, who,
with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he could hopefully hail, Ahab's voice was heard.
"Hast seen the White Whale?"
"Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?"
Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question; and would then have fain
boarded the stranger, when the stranger captain himself, having stopped his vessel's way, was
seen descending her side. A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the Pequod's main-
chains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was recognised by Ahab for a Nantucketer he
knew. But no formal salutation was exchanged.
"Where was he?—not killed!—not killed!" cried Ahab, closely advancing. "How was it?"
It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous, while three of the stranger's
boats were engaged with a shoal of whales, which had led them some four or five miles from the
ship; and while they were yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head of Moby Dick
had suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very far to leeward; whereupon, the fourth rigged boat
—a reserved one—had been instantly lowered in chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this
fourth boat—the swiftest keeled of all—seemed to have succeeded in fastening—at least, as well
as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about it. In the distance he saw the diminished
dotted boat; and then a swift gleam of bubbling white water; and after that nothing more; whence it
was concluded that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with his pursuers, as often
happens. There was some apprehension, but no positive alarm, as yet. The recall signals were
placed in the rigging; darkness came on; and forced to pick up her three far to windward boats
—ere going in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite direction—the ship had not only
been necessitated to leave that boat to its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her
distance from it. But the rest of her crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded all sail—stunsail
on stunsail—after the missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots for a beacon; and every other man
aloft on the look-out. But though when she had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the
presumed place of the absent ones when last seen; though she then paused to lower her spare
boats to pull all around her; and not finding anything, had again dashed on; again paused, and
lowered her boats; and though she had thus continued doing till daylight; yet not the least glimpse
of the missing keel had been seen.
The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his object in boarding the
Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his own in the search; by sailing over the sea some four
or five miles apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping a double horizon, as it were.
"I will wager something now," whispered Stubb to Flask, "that some one in that missing boat
wore off that Captain's best coat; mayhap, his watch—he's so cursed anxious to get it back. Who
ever heard of two pious whale-ships cruising after one missing whale-boat in the height of the
whaling season? See, Flask, only see how pale he looks—pale in the very buttons of his eyes
—look—it wasn't the coat—it must have been the—"
"My boy, my own boy is among them. For God's sake—I beg, I conjure"—here exclaimed the
stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far had but icily received his petition. "For eight-and-forty hours
let me charter your ship—I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it—if there be no other way—for
eight-and-forty hours only—only that—you must, oh, you must, and you SHALL do this thing."
 "His son!" cried Stubb, "oh, it's his son he's lost! I take back the coat and watch—what says
Ahab? We must save that boy."
"He's drowned with the rest on 'em, last night," said the old Manx sailor standing behind them; "I
heard; all of ye heard their spirits."
Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel's the more melancholy, was
the circumstance, that not only was one of the Captain's sons among the number of the missing
boat's crew; but among the number of the other boat's crews, at the same time, but on the other
hand, separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the chase, there had been still
another son; as that for a time, the wretched father was plunged to the bottom of the cruellest
perplexity; which was only solved for him by his chief mate's instinctively adopting the ordinary
procedure of a whale-ship in such emergencies, that is, when placed between jeopardized but
divided boats, always to pick up the majority first. But the captain, for some unknown constitutional
reason, had refrained from mentioning all this, and not till forced to it by Ahab's iciness did he
allude to his one yet missing boy; a little lad, but twelve years old, whose father with the earnest but
unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer's paternal love, had thus early sought to initiate him in the
perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his race. Nor does it
unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for
a protracted three or four years' voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their first
knowledge of a whaleman's career shall be unenervated by any chance display of a father's natural
but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern.
Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab; and Ahab still stood
like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own.
"I will not go," said the stranger, "till you say aye to me. Do to me as you would have me do to
you in the like case. For YOU too have a boy, Captain Ahab—though but a child, and nestling
safely at home now—a child of your old age too—Yes, yes, you relent; I see it—run, run, men, now,
and stand by to square in the yards."
"Avast," cried Ahab—"touch not a rope-yarn"; then in a voice that prolongingly moulded every
word—"Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye,
man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch, and in three
minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship
sail as before."
Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin, leaving the strange captain
transfixed at this unconditional and utter rejection of his so earnest suit. But starting from his
enchantment, Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than stepped into his boat, and
returned to his ship.
Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel was in view, she was
seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot, however small, on the sea. This way and that her
yards were swung round; starboard and larboard, she continued to tack; now she beat against a
head sea; and again it pushed her before it; while all the while, her masts and yards were thickly
clustered with men, as three tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs.
But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that this ship that so wept
with spray, still remained without comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they
were not.
CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.
 (AHAB MOVING TO GO ON DECK; PIP CATCHES HIM BY THE HAND TO FOLLOW.)
"Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not
scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too
curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired
health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad,
thou shalt sit here in my own screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be."
"No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread
upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye."
"Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man!—and a black!
and crazy!—but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too; he grows so sane again."
"They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose drowned bones now show
white, for all the blackness of his living skin. But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I
must go with ye."
"If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab's purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot
be."
"Oh good master, master, master!
"Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad. Listen, and thou wilt often
hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!
—Met! True art thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless thee; and if it
come to that,—God for ever save thee, let what will befall."
(AHAB GOES; PIP STEPS ONE STEP FORWARD.)
"Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,—but I'm alone. Now were even poor Pip here I
could endure it, but he's missing. Pip! Pip! Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip? He must be up
here; let's try the door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there's no opening it. It must be
the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I'll seat
me, against the transom, in the ship's full middle, all her keel and her three masts before me. Here,
our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it
over rows of captains and lieutenants. Ha! what's this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all come
crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs! What an odd feeling, now,
when a black boy's host to white men with gold lace upon their coats!—Monsieurs, have ye seen
one Pip?—a little negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a whale-
boat once;—seen him? No! Well then, fill up again, captains, and let's drink shame upon all
cowards! I name no names. Shame upon them! Put one foot upon the table. Shame upon all
cowards.—Hist! above there, I hear ivory—Oh, master! master! I am indeed down-hearted when
you walk over me. But here I'll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and
oysters come to join me."
 CHAPTER 130. The Hat.
And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab,
—all other whaling waters swept—seemed to have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him
the more securely there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and longitude where
his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day
preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick;—and now that all his successive meetings with
various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the white
whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against; now it was that there lurked a something
in the old man's eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting polar
star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months' night sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze;
so Ahab's purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It
domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain to hide
beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf.
In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural, vanished. Stubb no more strove to
raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear,
seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab's iron
soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious that the old man's despot
eye was on them.
But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when he thought no glance but
one was on him; then you would have seen that even as Ahab's eyes so awed the crew's, the
inscrutable Parsee's glance awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it.
Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah now; such ceaseless
shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether
indeed he were a mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some
unseen being's body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by night, even, had
Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below. He would stand still for hours: but
never sat or leaned; his wan but wondrous eyes did plainly say—We two watchmen never rest.
Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the deck, unless Ahab was
before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating
limits,—the main-mast and the mizen; or else they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle,—his living
foot advanced upon the deck, as if to step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however
motionless he stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung in his
hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell unerringly whether, for all this,
his eyes were really closed at times; or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter,
though he stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp
gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat. The clothes that the night had wet,
the next day's sunshine dried upon him; and so, day after day, and night after night; he went no
more beneath the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for.
He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,—breakfast and dinner: supper he never
touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown
over, which still grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But though his
whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee's mystic watch was without
intermission as his own; yet these two never seemed to speak—one man to the other—unless at
long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such a potent spell
seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck crew, they seemed pole-like
asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one word; by night, dumb men were both, so far as
concerned the slightest verbal interchange. At times, for longest hours, without a single hail, they
stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but still fixedly
gazing upon each other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee
his abandoned substance.
 And yet, somehow, did Ahab—in his own proper self, as daily, hourly, and every instant,
commandingly revealed to his subordinates,—Ahab seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but
his slave. Still again both seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean
shade siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel was solid Ahab.
At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard from aft,—"Man the mast-
heads!"—and all through the day, till after sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at
the striking of the helmsman's bell, was heard—"What d'ye see?—sharp! sharp!"
But when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the children-seeking Rachel; and no
spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac old man seemed distrustful of his crew's fidelity; at
least, of nearly all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether Stubb and
Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if these suspicions were really his, he
sagaciously refrained from verbally expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them.
"I will have the first sight of the whale myself,"—he said. "Aye! Ahab must have the doubloon!
and with his own hands he rigged a nest of basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a
single sheaved block, to secure to the main-mast head, he received the two ends of the
downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to his basket prepared a pin for the other end, in order
to fasten it at the rail. This done, with that end yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he
looked round upon his crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance long upon
Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his firm relying eye upon
the chief mate, said,—"Take the rope, sir—I give it into thy hands, Starbuck." Then arranging his
person in the basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him to his perch, Starbuck being the one
who secured the rope at last; and afterwards stood near it. And thus, with one hand clinging round
the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles,—ahead, astern, this side,
and that,—within the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a height.
When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in the rigging, which chances
to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is hoisted up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope;
under these circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given in strict charge to some one
man who has the special watch of it. Because in such a wilderness of running rigging, whose
various different relations aloft cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the
deck; and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes cast down from the
fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if, unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted
sailor should by some carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the sea. So
Ahab's proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the only strange thing about them seemed to
be, that Starbuck, almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in
the slightest degree approaching to decision—one of those too, whose faithfulness on the look-out
he had seemed to doubt somewhat;—it was strange, that this was the very man he should select
for his watchman; freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's hands.
Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten minutes; one of those red-
billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads
of whalemen in these latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head
in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet straight up into the air; then
spiralized downwards, and went eddying again round his head.
But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed not to mark this wild
bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it much, it being no uncommon circumstance;
only now almost the least heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost
every sight.
"Your hat, your hat, sir!" suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who being posted at the mizen-
mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat lower than his level, and with a deep gulf
of air dividing them.
But already the sable wing was before the old man's eyes; the long hooked bill at his head: with
a scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize.
 An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap to replace it, and thereupon
Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the
cap was that omen accounted good. Ahab's hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on
with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while from the point of that
disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea.
 CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the life-buoy-coffin still lightly
swung; and another ship, most miserably misnamed the Delight, was descried. As she drew nigh,
all eyes were fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross the
quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled
boats.
Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and some few splintered
planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you
see through the peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.
"Hast seen the White Whale?"
"Look!" replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with his trumpet he pointed to
the wreck.
"Hast killed him?"
"The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that," answered the other, sadly glancing upon a
rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered sides some noiseless sailors were busy in
sewing together.
"Not forged!" and snatching Perth's levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab held it out,
exclaiming—"Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and
tempered by lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind
the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!"
"Then God keep thee, old man—see'st thou that"—pointing to the hammock—"I bury but one of
five stout men, who were alive only yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only THAT one I bury; the
rest were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb." Then turning to his crew—"Are ye
ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and lift the body; so, then—Oh! God"—advancing
towards the hammock with uplifted hands—"may the resurrection and the life—"
"Brace forward! Up helm!" cried Ahab like lightning to his men.
But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound of the splash that
the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying
bubbles might have sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.
As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy hanging at the Pequod's
stern came into conspicuous relief.
"Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!" cried a foreboding voice in her wake. "In vain, oh, ye strangers,
ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!"
 CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-
pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and
the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's chest in his
sleep.
Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds; these were
the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue,
rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous
thinkings of the masculine sea.
But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows without; those
two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them.
Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea;
even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion—most
seen here at the Equator—denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor
bride gave her bosom away.
Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes
glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness
of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven.
Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round
us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were ye of old Ahab's close-coiled woe! But so
have I seen little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire;
sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that burnt-out crater of his
brain.
Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and watched how his
shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the
profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the
cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress
him; the step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his
stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and
erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab
dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.
Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side; and he seemed to
hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity
around. Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.
Ahab turned.
"Starbuck!"
"Sir."
"Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day—very much such a
sweetness as this—I struck my first whale—a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty—forty—forty
years ago!—ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-
time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty
years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I
have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has
been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to
any sympathy from the green country without—oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of
solitary command!—when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before
—and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my
soil!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh
bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty,
and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife? wife?
—rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her,
Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which,
for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a
man!—aye, aye! what a forty years' fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the
chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or
better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor
leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I
seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so
very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam,
staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!—crack my heart!—stave
my brain!—mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear
ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a
human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green
land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine
eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!—lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to
Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!"
"Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give
chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child,
too, are Starbuck's—wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine, sir, are
the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!—this instant let me
alter the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old
Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket."
"They have, they have. I have seen them—some summer days in the morning. About this time
—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him
of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him
again."
"'Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning, should be carried to
the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father's sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for
Nantucket! Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the boy's face
from the window! the boy's hand on the hill!"
But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered
apple to the soil.
"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and
master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and
longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making
me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab?
Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-
boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one
small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that
thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world,
like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this
unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish?
Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But
it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away
meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and
the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all
sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down,
and left in the half-cut swaths—Starbuck!"
 But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.
Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in
the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail.
 CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day.
That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man—as his wont at intervals—stepped forth from the
scuttle in which he leaned, and went to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely,
snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will, in drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He
declared that a whale must be near. Soon that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given
forth by the living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner surprised when,
after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and then ascertaining the precise bearing of
the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship's course to be slightly altered, and
the sail to be shortened.
The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated at daybreak, by the sight
of a long sleek on the sea directly and lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the
pleated watery wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift tide-rip, at the
mouth of a deep, rapid stream.
"Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!"
Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle deck, Daggoo roused
the sleepers with such judgment claps that they seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so
instantaneously did they appear with their clothes in their hands.
"What d'ye see?" cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.
"Nothing, nothing sir!" was the sound hailing down in reply.
"T'gallant sails!—stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!"
All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for swaying him to the main royal-mast
head; and in a few moments they were hoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way
aloft, and while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the main-top-sail and top-
gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the air. "There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a
snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!"
Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three look-outs, the men on deck
rushed to the rigging to behold the famous whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now
gained his final perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just beneath him on
the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the Indian's head was almost on a level with Ahab's heel.
From this height the whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing
his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into the air. To the credulous mariners
it seemed the same silent spout they had so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian
Oceans.
"And did none of ye see it before?" cried Ahab, hailing the perched men all around him.
"I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I cried out," said Tashtego.
"Not the same instant; not the same—no, the doubloon is mine, Fate reserved the doubloon for
me. I only; none of ye could have raised the White Whale first. There she blows!—there she blows!
—there she blows! There again!—there again!" he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic tones,
attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale's visible jets. "He's going to sound! In stunsails!
Down top-gallant-sails! Stand by three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on board, and keep
the ship. Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man, steady! There go flukes! No, no; only black
water! All ready the boats there? Stand by, stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower,—quick,
quicker!" and he slid through the air to the deck.
"He is heading straight to leeward, sir," cried Stubb, "right away from us; cannot have seen the
ship yet."
 "Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!—brace up! Shiver her!—shiver her!
—So; well that! Boats, boats!"
Soon all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped; all the boat-sails set—all the paddles plying;
with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit
up Fedallah's sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth.
Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea; but only slowly they neared
the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its
waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so
nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding
along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish
foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond. Before it, far out on
the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a
musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters interchangeably
flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and
danced by his side. But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly
feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff rising from the painted
hull of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale's back;
and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy
over the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like
pennons.
A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not
the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely,
leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for
the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified
White Whale as he so divinely swam.
On each soft side—coincident with the parted swell, that but once leaving him, then flowed so
wide away—on each bright side, the whale shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some
among the hunters who namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to
assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm,
oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same
way thou may'st have bejuggled and destroyed before.
And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among waves whose hand-
clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight
the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But
soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized body
formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the
air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly halting, and dipping
on the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly lingered over the agitated pool that he left.
With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the three boats now stilly
floated, awaiting Moby Dick's reappearance.
"An hour," said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat's stern; and he gazed beyond the whale's
place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant;
for again his eyes seemed whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze
now freshened; the sea began to swell.
"The birds!—the birds!" cried Tashtego.
In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now all flying towards Ahab's
boat; and when within a few yards began fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round,
with joyous, expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man's; Ahab could discover no sign in
the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white
living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it
rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening
teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick's open mouth and scrolled jaw;
his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned
beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep with his
steering oar, Ahab whirled the craft aside from this tremendous apparition. Then, calling upon
Fedallah to change places with him, went forward to the bows, and seizing Perth's harpoon,
commanded his crew to grasp their oars and stand by to stern.
Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis, its bow, by anticipation, was
made to face the whale's head while yet under water. But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby
Dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly transplanted himself, as it were, in
an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat.
Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for an instant, the whale
obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full
within his mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into the open air, and
one of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six
inches of Ahab's head, and reached higher than that. In this attitude the White Whale now shook
the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and
crossed his arms; but the tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other's heads to gain the
uttermost stern.
And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the whale dallied with the
doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his body being submerged beneath the boat, he could
not be darted at from the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and while the
other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it was that
monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and
helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his naked
hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped
from him; the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an enormous
shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain, and locked themselves fast again in the
sea, midway between the two floating wrecks. These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the
crew at the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold fast to the oars to lash them
across.
At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first to perceive the whale's
intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that
moment his hand had made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only slipping further
into the whale's mouth, and tilting over sideways as it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on
the jaw; spilled him out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the sea.
Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little distance, vertically thrusting his
oblong white head up and down in the billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole
spindled body; so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose—some twenty or more feet out of the
water—the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves, dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively
tossing their shivered spray still higher into the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled Channel
billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to overleap its summit with their
scud.
*This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation (pitchpoling) from its
being likened to that preliminary up-and-down poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called
pitchpoling, previously described. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively
view whatever objects may be encircling him.
But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round and round the wrecked
crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and
more deadly assault. The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood of
grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's elephants in the book of Maccabees. Meanwhile
Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale's insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,
—though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab's
head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst. From the boat's
fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting
end, could not succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves. For so
revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting
circles he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other boats,
unharmed, still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull into the eddy to strike, lest that should be
the signal for the instant destruction of the jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that case
could they themselves hope to escape. With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge
of the direful zone, whose centre had now become the old man's head.
Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship's mast heads; and
squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene; and was now so nigh, that Ahab in the
water hailed her!—"Sail on the"—but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick,
and whelmed him for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise on a towering
crest, he shouted,—"Sail on the whale!—Drive him off!"
The Pequod's prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she effectually parted
the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam off, the boats flew to the rescue.
Dragged into Stubb's boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white brine caking in his wrinkles;
the long tension of Ahab's bodily strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body's doom:
for a time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubb's boat, like one trodden under foot of herds of
elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as desolate sounds from out ravines.
But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more abbreviate it. In an instant's
compass, great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow
pains kindly diffused through feebler men's whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary in
each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe,
wholly made up of instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures
contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.
"The harpoon," said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one bended arm—"is it
safe?"
"Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it," said Stubb, showing it.
"Lay it before me;—any missing men?"
"One, two, three, four, five;—there were five oars, sir, and here are five men."
"That's good.—Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him! there! there! going to leeward
still; what a leaping spout!—Hands off from me! The eternal sap runs up in Ahab's bones again!
Set the sail; out oars; the helm!"
It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked up by another boat, help to
work that second boat; and the chase is thus continued with what is called double-banked oars. It
was thus now. But the added power of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale, for he
seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a velocity which plainly showed, that if
now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not
a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long a period, such an unintermitted, intense
straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then,
as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means of overtaking the
chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were soon swayed up to their cranes—the
two parts of the wrecked boat having been previously secured by her—and then hoisting
everything to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with stun-
sails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of
Moby-Dick. At the well known, methodic intervals, the whale's glittering spout was regularly
announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be reported as just gone down,
Ahab would take the time, and then pacing the deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last
second of the allotted hour expired, his voice was heard.—"Whose is the doubloon now? D'ye see
him?" and if the reply was, No, sir! straightway he commanded them to lift him to his perch. In this
way the day wore on; Ahab, now aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.
As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft, or to bid them hoist a sail
still higher, or to spread one to a still greater breadth—thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched
hat, at every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon the quarter-
deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered stern. At last he paused before it; and as in
an already over-clouded sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old
man's face there now stole some such added gloom as this.
Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to evince his own unabated
fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in his Captain's mind, he advanced, and eyeing the
wreck exclaimed—"The thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha!"
"What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did I not know thee brave as
fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear thou wert a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be
heard before a wreck."
"Aye, sir," said Starbuck drawing near, "'tis a solemn sight; an omen, and an ill one."
"Omen? omen?—the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honourably
speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives' darkling hint.—Begone! Ye two are
the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two
are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men
his neighbors! Cold, cold—I shiver!—How now? Aloft there! D'ye see him? Sing out for every
spout, though he spout ten times a second!"
The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling. Soon, it was almost
dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.
"Can't see the spout now, sir;—too dark"—cried a voice from the air.
"How heading when last seen?"
"As before, sir,—straight to leeward."
"Good! he will travel slower now 'tis night. Down royals and top-gallant stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck.
We must not run over him before morning; he's making a passage now, and may heave-to a while.
Helm there! keep her full before the wind!—Aloft! come down!—Mr. Stubb, send a fresh hand to
the fore-mast head, and see it manned till morning."—Then advancing towards the doubloon in the
main-mast—"Men, this gold is mine, for I earned it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is
dead; and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that
man's; and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all
of ye! Away now!—the deck is thine, sir!"
And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and slouching his hat, stood there till
dawn, except when at intervals rousing himself to see how the night wore on.
 CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day.
At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.
"D'ye see him?" cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the light to spread.
"See nothing, sir."
"Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought for;—the top-gallant sails!—aye,
they should have been kept on her all night. But no matter—'tis but resting for the rush."
Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale, continued through day into
night, and through night into day, is a thing by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery.
For such is the wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible confidence acquired by
some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders; that from the simple observation
of a whale when last descried, they will, under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately
foretell both the direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of sight, as well as
his probable rate of progression during that period. And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot,
when about losing sight of a coast, whose general trending he well knows, and which he desires
shortly to return to again, but at some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass, and
takes the precise bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright the
remote, unseen headland, eventually to be visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the
whale; for after being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours of daylight, then, when
night obscures the fish, the creature's future wake through the darkness is almost as established to
the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the pilot's coast is to him. So that to this hunter's wondrous
skill, the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all desired purposes well
nigh as reliable as the steadfast land. And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so
familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors
that of a baby's pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a
spot, at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions when these Nantucketers time
that other Leviathan of the deep, according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to
themselves, so many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have about
reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to render this acuteness at all successful in
the end, the wind and the sea must be the whaleman's allies; for of what present avail to the
becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and
a quarter from his port? Inferable from these statements, are many collateral subtile matters
touching the chase of whales.
The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a
plough-share and turns up the level field.
"By salt and hemp!" cried Stubb, "but this swift motion of the deck creeps up one's legs and
tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two brave fellows!—Ha, ha! Some one take me up, and
launch me, spine-wise, on the sea,—for by live-oaks! my spine's a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait that
leaves no dust behind!"
"There she blows—she blows!—she blows!—right ahead!" was now the mast-head cry.
"Aye, aye!" cried Stubb, "I knew it—ye can't escape—blow on and split your spout, O whale! the
mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your trump—blister your lungs!—Ahab will dam off your blood,
as a miller shuts his watergate upon the stream!"
And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies of the chase had by this time
worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings
some of them might have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing
awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares that scatter
before the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils
of the previous day; the rack of the past night's suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way
in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were
bowled along. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms
invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to
the race.
They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together
of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these
ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by
the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear;
guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal
which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.
The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with
arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one hand, some reached forth the other with impatient
wavings; others, shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking yards; all the
spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that
infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them!
"Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?" cried Ahab, when, after the lapse of some minutes
since the first cry, no more had been heard. "Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby
Dick casts one odd jet that way, and then disappears."
It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some other thing for the
whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the
rope belayed to its pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the air
vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs
was heard, as—much nearer to the ship than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead
—Moby Dick bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the
peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal his vicinity; but
by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the
furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling
up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more. In those
moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching
is his act of defiance.
"There she breaches! there she breaches!" was the cry, as in his immeasurable bravadoes the
White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea,
and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment,
intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and stood there gradually fading and fading away
from its first sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.
"Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!" cried Ahab, "thy hour and thy harpoon are at hand!
—Down! down all of ye, but one man at the fore. The boats!—stand by!"
Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like shooting stars, slid to the
deck, by the isolated backstays and halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was
dropped from his perch.
"Lower away," he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat—a spare one, rigged the afternoon
previous. "Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine—keep away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower,
all!"
As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first assailant himself, Moby Dick
had turned, and was now coming for the three crews. Ahab's boat was central; and cheering his
men, he told them he would take the whale head-and-head,—that is, pull straight up to his
forehead,—a not uncommon thing; for when within a certain limit, such a course excludes the
coming onset from the whale's sidelong vision. But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all
three boats were plain as the ship's three masts to his eye; the White Whale churning himself into
furious speed, almost in an instant as it were, rushing among the boats with open jaws, and a
lashing tail, offered appalling battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from
every boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which those boats were
made. But skilfully manoeuvred, incessantly wheeling like trained chargers in the field; the boats for
a while eluded him; though, at times, but by a plank's breadth; while all the time, Ahab's unearthly
slogan tore every other cry but his to shreds.
But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed and recrossed, and in a
thousand ways entangled the slack of the three lines now fast to him, that they foreshortened, and,
of themselves, warped the devoted boats towards the planted irons in him; though now for a
moment the whale drew aside a little, as if to rally for a more tremendous charge. Seizing that
opportunity, Ahab first paid out more line: and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again
—hoping that way to disencumber it of some snarls—when lo!—a sight more savage than the
embattled teeth of sharks!
Caught and twisted—corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose harpoons and lances, with all
their bristling barbs and points, came flashing and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab's
boat. Only one thing could be done. Seizing the boat-knife, he critically reached within—through
—and then, without—the rays of steel; dragged in the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the
bowsman, and then, twice sundering the rope near the chocks—dropped the intercepted fagot of
steel into the sea; and was all fast again. That instant, the White Whale made a sudden rush
among the remaining tangles of the other lines; by so doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved
boats of Stubb and Flask towards his flukes; dashed them together like two rolling husks on a surf-
beaten beach, and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in which,
for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated
nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.
While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after the revolving line-tubs,
oars, and other floating furniture, while aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial,
twitching his legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily singing out
for some one to ladle him up; and while the old man's line—now parting—admitted of his pulling
into the creamy pool to rescue whom he could;—in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand
concreted perils,—Ahab's yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards Heaven by invisible
wires,—as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad
forehead against its bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till it fell again—gunwale
downwards—and Ahab and his men struggled out from under it, like seals from a sea-side cave.
The first uprising momentum of the whale—modifying its direction as he struck the surface
—involuntarily launched him along it, to a little distance from the centre of the destruction he had
made; and with his back to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling with his flukes from side to
side; and whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin,
his tail swiftly drew back, and came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his
work for that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the ocean, and trailing after
him the intertangled lines, continued his leeward way at a traveller's methodic pace.
As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight, again came bearing down to the
rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the floating mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else could
be caught at, and safely landed them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and ankles;
livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable intricacies of rope; shattered oars
and planks; all these were there; but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one.
As with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to his boat's broken half,
which afforded a comparatively easy float; nor did it so exhaust him as the previous day's mishap.
But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as instead of standing by
himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder of Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to
assist him. His ivory leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter.
"Aye, aye, Starbuck, 'tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he will; and would old Ahab
had leaned oftener than he has."
 "The ferrule has not stood, sir," said the carpenter, now coming up; "I put good work into that
leg."
"But no bones broken, sir, I hope," said Stubb with true concern.
"Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!—d'ye see it.—But even with a broken bone, old Ahab
is untouched; and I account no living bone of mine one jot more me, than this dead one that's lost.
Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and
inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape yonder roof?—Aloft there!
which way?"
"Dead to leeward, sir."
"Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of the spare boats and rig
them—Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat's crews."
"Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir."
"Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the unconquerable captain in
the soul should have such a craven mate!"
"Sir?"
"My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane—there, that shivered lance will do.
Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet. By heaven it cannot be!—missing?—quick! call
them all."
The old man's hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the Parsee was not there.
"The Parsee!" cried Stubb—"he must have been caught in—"
"The black vomit wrench thee!—run all of ye above, alow, cabin, forecastle—find him—not gone
—not gone!"
But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was nowhere to be found.
"Aye, sir," said Stubb—"caught among the tangles of your line—I thought I saw him dragging
under."
"MY line! MY line? Gone?—gone? What means that little word?—What death-knell rings in it,
that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry. The harpoon, too!—toss over the litter there,—d'ye
see it?—the forged iron, men, the white whale's—no, no, no,—blistered fool! this hand did dart
it!—'tis in the fish!—Aloft there! Keep him nailed—Quick!—all hands to the rigging of the boats
—collect the oars—harpooneers! the irons, the irons!—hoist the royals higher—a pull on all the
sheets!—helm there! steady, steady for your life! I'll ten times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea
and dive straight through it, but I'll slay him yet!
"Great God! but for one single instant show thyself," cried Starbuck; "never, never wilt thou
capture him, old man—In Jesus' name no more of this, that's worse than devil's madness. Two
days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil
shadow gone—all good angels mobbing thee with warnings:—
"What more wouldst thou have?—Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the
last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the
infernal world? Oh, oh,—Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!"
"Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw—thou
know'st what, in one another's eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as
the palm of this hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's
immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool!
I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.—Stand
round me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up
on a lonely foot. 'Tis Ahab—his body's part; but Ahab's soul's a centipede, that moves upon a
hundred legs. I feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I
may look so. But ere I break, yell hear me crack; and till ye hear THAT, know that Ahab's hawser
tows his purpose yet. Believe ye, men, in the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry
encore! For ere they drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface; then rise again, to sink
for evermore. So with Moby Dick—two days he's floated—tomorrow will be the third. Aye, men,
he'll rise once more,—but only to spout his last! D'ye feel brave men, brave?"
"As fearless fire," cried Stubb.
"And as mechanical," muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward, he muttered on: "The
things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same to Starbuck there, concerning my broken
boat. Oh! how valiantly I seek to drive out of others' hearts what's clinched so fast in mine!—The
Parsee—the Parsee!—gone, gone? and he was to go before:—but still was to be seen again ere I
could perish—How's that?—There's a riddle now might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts
of the whole line of judges:—like a hawk's beak it pecks my brain. I'LL, I'LL solve it, though!"
When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.
So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly as on the previous night;
only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of the grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the
men toiled by lanterns in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and sharpening their
fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken keel of Ahab's wrecked craft the carpenter
made him another leg; while still as on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his
scuttle; his hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial; sat due eastward for the
earliest sun.
 CHAPTER 135. The Chase.—Third Day.
The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the solitary night-man at the
fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds of the daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and
almost every spar.
"D'ye see him?" cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.
"In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that's all. Helm there; steady, as thou goest,
and hast been going. What a lovely day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-
house to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not
dawn upon that world. Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he
only feels, feels, feels; THAT'S tingling enough for mortal man! to think's audacity. God only has that
right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts
throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. And yet, I've sometimes thought my brain was
very calm—frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned to ice,
and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no,
it's like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of Greenland
ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split
sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison
corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as
innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!—it's tainted. Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked,
miserable world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, 'tis a noble and heroic
thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at
it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to
receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing than THAT. Would now the wind
but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are
bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There's a most special, a most cunning, oh, a
most malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that there's something all
glorious and gracious in the wind. These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens
blow straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark, however
the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of the land swift and
swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the eternal Poles! these same Trades that so
directly blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like them—something so
unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along! To it! Aloft there! What d'ye see?"
"Nothing, sir."
"Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See the sun! Aye, aye, it must be
so. I've oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye, he's chasing ME now; not I, HIM—that's bad; I
might have known it, too. Fool! the lines—the harpoons he's towing. Aye, aye, I have run him by last
night. About! about! Come down, all of ye, but the regular look outs! Man the braces!"
Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod's quarter, so that now
being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she
rechurned the cream in her own white wake.
"Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw," murmured Starbuck to himself, as he coiled
the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. "God keep us, but already my bones feel damp within
me, and from the inside wet my flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!"
"Stand by to sway me up!" cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket. "We should meet him
soon."
"Aye, aye, sir," and straightway Starbuck did Ahab's bidding, and once more Ahab swung on
high.
 A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held long breaths with keen
suspense. But at last, some three points off the weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and
instantly from the three mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it.
"Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck there!—brace sharper
up; crowd her into the wind's eye. He's too far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand
over that helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But let me have one
more good round look aloft here at the sea; there's time for that. An old, old sight, and yet
somehow so young; aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of
Nantucket! The same!—the same!—the same to Noah as to me. There's a soft shower to leeward.
Such lovely leewardings! They must lead somewhere—to something else than common land, more
palmy than the palms. Leeward! the white whale goes that way; look to windward, then; the better if
the bitterer quarter. But good bye, good bye, old mast-head! What's this?—green? aye, tiny
mosses in these warped cracks. No such green weather stains on Ahab's head! There's the
difference now between man's old age and matter's. But aye, old mast, we both grow old together;
sound in our hulls, though, are we not, my ship? Aye, minus a leg, that's all. By heaven this dead
wood has the better of my live flesh every way. I can't compare with it; and I've known some ships
made of dead trees outlast the lives of men made of the most vital stuff of vital fathers. What's that
he said? he should still go before me, my pilot; and yet to be seen again? But where? Will I have
eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those endless stairs? and all night I've been
sailing from him, wherever he did sink to. Aye, aye, like many more thou told'st direful truth as
touching thyself, O Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good-bye, mast-head—keep a good
eye upon the whale, the while I'm gone. We'll talk to-morrow, nay, to-night, when the white whale lies
down there, tied by head and tail."
He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered through the cloven blue air to
the deck.
In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop's stern, Ahab just hovered
upon the point of the descent, he waved to the mate,—who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck
—and bade him pause.
"Starbuck!"
"Sir?"
"For the third time my soul's ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck."
"Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so."
"Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing, Starbuck!"
"Truth, sir: saddest truth."
"Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;—and I feel now like
a billow that's all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old;—shake hands with me, man."
Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue.
"Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!—see, it's a brave man that weeps;
how great the agony of the persuasion then!"
"Lower away!"—cried Ahab, tossing the mate's arm from him. "Stand by the crew!"
In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.
"The sharks! the sharks!" cried a voice from the low cabin-window there; "O master, my master,
come back!"
But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the boat leaped on.
Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when numbers of sharks,
seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of
the oars, every time they dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their
bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the
sharks at times apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures hover over the
banners of marching regiments in the east. But these were the first sharks that had been observed
by the Pequod since the White Whale had been first descried; and whether it was that Ahab's crew
were all such tiger-yellow barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses of the
sharks—a matter sometimes well known to affect them,—however it was, they seemed to follow
that one boat without molesting the others.
"Heart of wrought steel!" murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and following with his eyes
the receding boat—"canst thou yet ring boldly to that sight?—lowering thy keel among ravening
sharks, and followed by them, open-mouthed to the chase; and this the critical third day?—For
when three days flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure the first is the morning, the
second the noon, and the third the evening and the end of that thing—be that end what it may. Oh!
my God! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant,—fixed
at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the
past is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to see
but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep
between—Is my journey's end coming? My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy
heart,—beats it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!—stave it off—move, move! speak aloud!—Mast-head
there! See ye my boy's hand on the hill?—Crazed;—aloft there!—keep thy keenest eye upon the
boats:—
"Mark well the whale!—Ho! again!—drive off that hawk! see! he pecks—he tears the vane"
—pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck—"Ha! he soars away with it!—Where's the old
man now? see'st thou that sight, oh Ahab!—shudder, shudder!"
The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads—a downward pointed
arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but intending to be near him at the next rising, he held
on his way a little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the profoundest
silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered against the opposing bow.
"Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads drive them in! ye but strike a
thing without a lid; and no coffin and no hearse can be mine:—and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!"
Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly upheaved, as if
sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound
was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes,
and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a
thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping
back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of
fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new
milk round the marble trunk of the whale.
"Give way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack; but
maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly
possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading
his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he
came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons
and lances from the two mates' boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but
leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.
While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the whale swimming
out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he shot by them again; at that moment a
quick cry went up. Lashed round and round to the fish's back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in
which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half
torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned
full upon old Ahab.
 The harpoon dropped from his hand.
"Befooled, befooled!"—drawing in a long lean breath—"Aye, Parsee! I see thee again.—Aye,
and thou goest before; and this, THIS then is the hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to
the last letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those boats are
useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me; if not, Ahab is enough to die—Down,
men! the first thing that but offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are not
other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.—Where's the whale? gone down again?"
But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the corpse he bore, and as if
the particular place of the last encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick
was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,—which thus far had
been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present her headway had been
stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own
straight path in the sea.
"Oh! Ahab," cried Starbuck, "not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick
seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!"
Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly impelled to leeward, by both oars and
canvas. And at last when Ahab was sliding by the vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish
Starbuck's face as he leaned over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and follow him,
not too swiftly, at a judicious interval. Glancing upwards, he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and
Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads; while the oarsmen were rocking in the two
staved boats which had but just been hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing
them. One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped, he also caught flying glimpses of
Stubb and Flask, busying themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and lances. As he saw
all this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats; far other hammers seemed driving a nail
into his heart. But he rallied. And now marking that the vane or flag was gone from the main-mast-
head, he shouted to Tashtego, who had just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag,
and a hammer and nails, and so nail it to the mast.
Whether fagged by the three days' running chase, and the resistance to his swimming in the
knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever
was true, the White Whale's way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly
nearing him once more; though indeed the whale's last start had not been so long a one as before.
And still as Ahab glided over the waves the unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so
pertinaciously stuck to the boat; and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became
jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost every dip.
"Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars. Pull on! 'tis the better rest, the
shark's jaw than the yielding water."
"But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!"
"They will last long enough! pull on!—But who can tell"—he muttered—"whether these sharks
swim to feast on the whale or on Ahab?—But pull on! Aye, all alive, now—we near him. The helm!
take the helm! let me pass,"—and so saying two of the oarsmen helped him forward to the bows of
the still flying boat.
At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with the White Whale's flank,
he seemed strangely oblivious of its advance—as the whale sometimes will—and Ahab was fairly
within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale's spout, curled round his great,
Monadnock hump; he was even thus close to him; when, with body arched back, and both arms
lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated
whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into a morass, Moby Dick
sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole
in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of the gunwale to
which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed into the sea. As it was, three of the
oarsmen—who foreknew not the precise instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for its
effects—these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two of them clutched the gunwale again,
and rising to its level on a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third man
helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.
Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated, instantaneous swiftness, the White
Whale darted through the weltering sea. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new
turns with the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their seats, and tow
the boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line felt that double strain and tug, it snapped
in the empty air!
"What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!—'tis whole again; oars! oars! Burst in upon him!"
Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled round to present his
blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship;
seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it—it may be—a larger and
nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery
showers of foam.
Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. "I grow blind; hands! stretch out before me that I
may yet grope my way. Is't night?"
"The whale! The ship!" cried the cringing oarsmen.
"Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for ever too late, Ahab may
slide this last, last time upon his mark! I see: the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not save
my ship?"
But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the sledge-hammering seas, the before
whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks burst through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily
disabled boat lay nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying hard to stop the
gap and bale out the pouring water.
Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego's mast-head hammer remained suspended
in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out
from him, as his own forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the bowsprit
beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon as he.
"The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air, now hug me close! Let
not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a woman's fainting fit. Up helm, I say—ye fools, the jaw! the jaw!
Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities? Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work.
Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable
brow drives on towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now!"
"Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help Stubb; for Stubb, too,
sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but
Stubb's own unwinking eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is all too soft;
would it were stuffed with brushwood! I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and
stars! I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost. For all that, I would yet
ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou grinning whale, but there'll be
plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in
his drawers! A most mouldy and over salted death, though;—cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh,
Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!"
"Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope my poor mother's drawn
my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will now come to her, for the voyage is up."
From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances,
and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their various
employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely
vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before
him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite
of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard
bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads
of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters
pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.
"The ship! The hearse!—the second hearse!" cried Ahab from the boat; "its wood could only be
American!"
Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel; but turning under water,
swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where,
for a time, he lay quiescent.
"I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three
unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and
haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,—death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me?
Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely
life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest
bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of
my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with
thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and
all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while
still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! THUS, I give up the spear!"
The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran
through the grooves;—ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught
him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the
boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew
out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its
depths.
For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned. "The ship? Great God, where is
the ship?" Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in
the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or
fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking
lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and
each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round
in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.
But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at
the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards
of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they
almost touched;—at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open
air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that
tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking
at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering
wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the
submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of
heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form
folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she
had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its
steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand
years ago.
 Epilogue
"AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE" Job.
The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one did survive the
wreck.
It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take
the place of Ahab's bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when
on the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So,
floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the
sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it,
it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-
like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till,
gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning
spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise
from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day
and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with
padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day,
a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her
retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

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